Meeting the retail holiday rush

Bob Wambach at Dynatrace explains how retailers can prepare for peak traffic and enjoy a successful holiday shopping season 

 

The growing complexity of supply chains is leaving retailers more exposed to unexpected issues that can disrupt their operations. At the same time, rising global inflation has impacted retailers’ costs and influenced changes in their customers’ spending habits. No two years are alike in the retail sector. This is equally true for the annual rush triggered by the holiday shopping season. 

 

For decades, the months of October to December have offered a major opportunity for retailers to capture revenue. These peak traffic moments are increasingly important for retailers in a challenging economic climate. To meet consumer demand, and remain profitable, retailers must be able to operate effectively during retail high points, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as the December holidays and into the new year. 

 

However, UK consumers have been impacted by cost-of-living squeezes, and many now adopt a more considered approach to their spending. To reach these more conscious consumers with appropriate products, retailers must adopt data-driven strategies. This means effectively leveraging their consumers’ buying data to provide them with a precise, personalized experience.

 

By delivering tailored shopping experiences, retailers can demonstrate their value and convince cautious buyers to engage with them. 

 

Online shopping: retail’s guiding star

IT and data now hold the key to retailers’ success. These digital capabilities are the most effective avenue for understanding consumer habits, and translating these into increased revenue. 

 

While traditional high points of in-person shopping, such as Black Friday, have become less influential in recent years, many UK consumers still look for online holiday bargains – such as during Cyber Monday. In 2023, a survey found that 53% of UK consumers set aside funds for these days, despite ongoing reductions in in-person shopping. Festive shopping is no longer a one-day, in-person event, but is increasingly spread over weeks and months, as consumers go online to find the best bargains.

 

In the past, retailers could focus on preparing for and staying operational during short-lived traffic peaks. Now, with the shift to online shopping, retailers must ensure their digital performance remains high quality throughout the entire holiday season. This is not just a question of digital resilience, but one of data, analysing customer journeys, buyer behaviour, and adapting retail strategies to respond to consumer behaviours throughout this extended period.

 

Investing in technology

Retailers are predicted to grow their retail technology spending by 10% each year between 2024 and 2028. But they must invest in the right technologies to drive sustained success. This involves preparing their systems to handle high intensity traffic, as well as unpredictability around when customer numbers will spike. When things go wrong and service is impacted during a critical sales period, retailers can’t afford to take days to identify issues and resolve them.

 

Instead, they need real-time, full stack monitoring processes and tools in place. These can be used to simulate user behavior, and test traffic loads ahead of anticipated peaks, to establish organization-wide confidence in systems’ ability to function as required at all times. 

 

AI-driven monitoring and observability are key to keeping retailers’ ecommerce platforms online at all times. IT systems have become far more complex – and create far more data – than humans can manage alone. Retailers must leverage AI tools to resolve issues before they impact the customer experience.

 

They can also use causal AI tools to identify contributing factors to incidents, and to power intelligent automation for incident remediation, so that these are resolved in near real-time.

 

Data-driven insights

The holiday shopping rush represents a high intensity microcosm of consumers’ buying habits from the rest of the year. This period is a battleground for retailers to convert cautious or opportunistic shoppers into purchases. When discretionary spending is under pressure, a targeted, data-driven approach is paramount. The average cart abandonment rate is 66.5%, meaning retailers lose two-thirds of their revenue after a consumer has decided to buy a product. Converting sales is becoming more difficult, and it’s easier than ever to lose one.

 

Observability data can enable retailers to more effectively prepare themselves to profit from the holiday season. Every click, tap or swipe throughout the customer journey provides retailers with crucial information. To make the most of this data, retailers must have end-to-end visibility of the customer journey, presented within the context of their wider business data, to build a picture of how every single customer interacts with a retailer’s website and mobile applications.

 

Snapshots of the customer experience can help to diagnose individual issues, but insight into the end-to-end digital customer journey allows retailers to build a picture of customer behaviours and respond to these to capitalize on opportunities to drive revenue. 

 

One function that can help retailers understand points of friction for consumers is session replay. This allows them to see what an individual customer saw, and identify the exact causes of cart abandonment. There are a number of factors that can drive this: difficult to navigate pages, differences between mobile and web experiences, or issues with payment portals.

 

Understanding how these factors affect the consumer experience will set retailers apart from their competitors, and equip them with the tools they need to improve customers’ digital experience to drive revenue. 

 

By investing in the right technology to drive meaningful improvements to their digital services – both in terms of resilience and personalization – wise retailers can make sure consumers get their gold, frankincense and myrrh this holiday season.

 

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Bob Wambach is VP of Product Portfolio, Dynatrace

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and ArtistGNDphotography