Holiday sales: don’t crash this Christmas

It’s November and a lot of e-commerce sites are already gearing up to their busiest time of the year.

Many of our clients are getting ready to drop Black Friday deals, but holiday sales aren't just about discounting to get people through the door. What if you don't need to run drops or special events, because you know your product will fly out regardless?

For retailers expecting a seasonal rush in November and December, we recommend protecting your site in advance of the hordes, by setting up a waiting room right now.

Waiting rooms for drops and events

Firstly, if you are running special promotions, sales, product drops and events this holiday season, then you might want to think about some of the ways a Black Friday waiting room can help – including creating special-purpose waiting rooms for daily drops, and a promotional waiting room to show off your best offers while customers wait in the queue.

Read more: Are you ready for Black Friday?

However, we know that many of our customers choose not to discount Black Friday – because they don’t need to. If you’re selling a product that makes a good gift, the run up to Christmas will always be your busiest time of year.

A waiting room for the gifting season

Last year we saw CrowdHandler clients selling everything from clothing to cosmetics, pantomime tickets to pizza ovens, team shirts to tech throughout November and December. These are the kinds of niche products that make great gifts and so will be bought right up to Christmas day.

None of these retailers needed to cannibalise their prices with deals, but they all experienced vastly increased traffic in the immediate run-up to Christmas (with many making as much as six months’ worth of revenue in a few weeks).

And they all needed a waiting room to prevent their websites from crashing.

Don’t get spiked

What’s more, increased seasonal traffic often comes in unpredictable spikes. Over the last couple of years, we’ve noticed that website traffic during a single day tends to yo-yo a lot more than it used to do. Instead of a single evening peak for sales, as these numbers show, purchases are being made throughout the day – perhaps because more people are working from home.

If you have a giftable product and you’re worrying about your site crashing at any point over the next few months, you’ll be pleased to know there’s a simple answer: put a catch-all waiting room in place right now.

Protect your ecommerce site from crashing

The virtual waiting room we recommend for e-commerce sites like this is very simple. It’s a general waiting room with a set ingress rate – so it’s always on, but only functions when necessary. When the rate of traffic to your site goes above the rate you've set – at any time, day or night – the waiting room will kick in and handle it. We call this “set and forget”.

Once you've fixed the rate, you'll probably go through periods in the day when there's no queue, and periods in the day where there is a substantial queue. But you won't need to worry. Whatever the circumstances, your waiting room will protect your site throughout the whole holiday season, and take the load whenever traffic threatens to overwhelm it. And when you're quiet, the waiting room will stay out of your way.

We know from our extensive experience with e-commerce sites that customers would rather be in a virtual queue than on a site that crashes as they’re trying to make a purchase. After all, wouldn’t you be prepared to wait a few minutes for the perfect gift?

Set up your holiday sales waiting room today

Ready to protect your e-commerce site over the holidays?

Sign up to CrowdHandler right now and you’ll get 30 days to try out all our features for free. After that, you can either upgrade, or keep us on standby with our free lite tier until you’re ready to go.

Happy selling!