With Thanksgiving over, the holiday shopping season is usually the busiest time of the year for any e-commerce site. For some companies, the whole year’s profitability hinges upon this season to make or break the year. With Black Friday kicking off earlier and earlier, here are some essential must-do that any in e-commerce should have in place to ensure that the site stays up.
There is no substitute for having a plan and having redundancies on top of those plan as things are bound to go wrong during the most critical time of the year. Having worked for Microsoft.com that maintains an extensive footprint in selling Xbox to Microsoft Surface, to leading countless web retailers, here are some areas of focus that needs to be in motion to support the sales activity.
Site reliability:
There is nothing more frustrating for a consumer when the site fails to load, and I have seen this a dozen times this year. Argh!!
At the very heart of your online business is your website and this is imperative that the site is up and running, but much better than your slowest day of the year. Why? You are vying for attention from users that have an elevated distraction level with the holiday season and you are competing against giants like Amazon to Wal-Mart that have site up-time to a science.
Establish a cross functional team with the site operation lead, or engineering lead leading the team. The team is responsible for maintaining and establishing service level indicators (SLIs), objectives (SLOs), and agreements (SLAs). Before the peak season,
Key focus area
- Proactively monitor and review application performance
- Handle on-call and emergency support
- Create and maintain operational runbooks
- Help triage escalated support tickets
- Work on feature requests, defects and other development tasks
- Contribute to overall product roadmap
- Setup an server internal or external up time monitor
Server reliability