With another Thanksgiving holiday weekend on the way, we all know what’s coming hot on its tail: Black Friday. It’s no different from any other year, except now we are also aware of just how profoundly consumers’ buying habits have changed. With the dramatic impact of COVID-19 lockdowns, e-commerce sellers have seen a significant uptick in online purchasing — including everything from food deliveries to day-to-day essentials.
Between 2019 and 2020 alone, the e-commerce trade jumped a stunning 32.4%, according to CNBC. Their report added that this spike translated to e-commerce transactions accounting for 14% of all retail sales in 2020, compared to only 11% in 2019. With such a notable leap in online shopping, the 2021 holiday season — and Black Friday, specifically — is poised to set new records for e-commerce sellers.
Ready or Not, Here Comes Black Friday
Last year, nearly 50 major brands experienced outages to their retail sites over the five-day period from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, due to the spike in online traffic and purchases. And these weren’t small, independent shops. They included high-profile brands such as Adidas, Playstation, Petsmart, H&M, Best Buy, Vistaprint, Old Navy, and – shockingly enough – even Big Tech titans Apple, Etsy, and PayPal.
Without preparation, this year could follow a similar pattern. After all, we can confidently predict that online purchasing trends will dramatically impact the already staggering buying frenzy during our upcoming Black Friday. So how can e-commerce companies prepare for what could potentially be an overwhelming surge in website traffic?
Snapt Into Black Friday Preparation
Over the past decade, conscientious and forward-thinking executives from a diverse pool of businesses have entrusted Snapt — a flexible, cost-effective application delivery platform — to bolster the security, visibility, and control of their websites, web servers, and APIs. Their goal? To help their customers scale, protect, and adapt so they can grow and innovate without constraint.
Snapt’s all-in-one solutions for high availability, performance, and disaster recovery can help protect any application, any cloud, and any platform at any scale — as evidenced via their support of non-profit social enterprise Khalibre. Founded in 2007, Khalibre’s offering includes rapid course development capabilities and a platform to deliver digital learning experiences that align with organizational goals.
Khalibre knew that they needed to shift to a scalable, cost-effective, quality ADC solution. But they struggled to find a suitable option that addressed their need for security, reliability, and high performance. Snapt’s diverse team of software architects, developers, support engineers, and commercial staff came to the rescue, partnering with Khalibre to enhance web performance across the board. Quickly, Khalibre saw significant website improvements, reporting that their clients were downloading their e-learning solutions “ten times faster” and experiencing far fewer problems along the way.
“Faster Than Ever” E-commerce Solutions
Khalibre’s success working with Snapt is merely one example of entrepreneurs who, in today’s rapid-paced e-commerce boom, must “learn and adapt quickly,” as Snapt CEO Dave Blakey puts it. “It’s easier than ever to adjust to changes, and they are happening faster than ever. The speed at which the world moves today is an opportunity.”
Blakey is himself no stranger to understanding and making big moves when it comes to this “faster than ever” economic arena, with a background that includes having previously launched Opteq International, a global hardware networking company, before founding Snapt.
“Tracking and predicting a very fast-moving market with a large number of components and technologies is hard when you are constantly trying to be ahead of the market,” Blakey says. Because this methodology, as he adds, “requires a large amount of time, and time is often not available, and hiring the right people makes the world of difference for a technology company.”
Snapt-ing Into Action
Pinpointing the secret of his longtime success as Snapt CEO and CTO, Blakey revealed that he “likes to lead by example. I prefer to be quick and decisive and iterate on decisions and designs. In a company like ours where you are surrounded by amazing, capable, smart people, the key is ensuring we are headed towards our goal and that everyone is enabled to do what they are best at.”
With such a ready-and-able team helmed by CEO Blakey and co-CEO and fellow founder, Doug Cherry, it’s no wonder that Snapt remains the most viable solution for post-pandemic challenges regarding scale and compliance, particularly during extraordinary periods of consumption — such as 2021’s Black Friday online buying extravaganza to come.
The digital marketplace is evolving rapidly, and this Black Friday, a website crash could be the difference between a banner year and a banner failure. For e-commerce brands looking ahead to a booming holiday sales season, it’s vital to look beyond sales and marketing. Retailers must stay ahead of the game with a website and purchasing platform that are fast, functional, and perform under pressure.