Plan your Black Friday IT and run the tests in advance. After all, your site must work during one of the busiest shopping days of the year

Moreover, Black Friday is now the second-biggest e-commerce date in Brazil, behind only Christmas. In a 2021 survey, Neotrust put revenue for the period at R$ 5.4 billion. Around the same time, a Reclame Aqui study listed the three main consumer complaints. Therefore, they are worth a look:

– 14.3% had problems with technology, such as slowness, instability, and difficulty accessing the site;

– 30.5% struggled with Customer Service.

– 10.5% were affected by payment methods. Imagine entering the site, choosing a product, and then failing to pay?

In practice, plan your Black Friday IT with our Guide, which covers 5 points of attention for this date. Access it and learn more! Talk to our team.

Therefore, a few precautions avoid these problems when you plan your Black Friday IT. In every edition, the share of complaints tied to technology stays relevant. Above all, people must browse quickly and read product descriptions. They also need to add items to the cart and complete the purchase. 

Black Friday IT: the main precautions

– Rapid infrastructure expansion – The site takes far more traffic than on an average day. Regardless of company size, the customer expects to browse without friction. For this reason, containers and autoscaling are now the default way to follow demand, which can be simplified with a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Next, check whether your structure really scales under pressure. In addition, FinOps helps size the cloud for the peak without blowing the budget. As a result, the challenge is no longer only keeping the site online.

Test before the customer does

– Run tests – Continuous load tests show how the site reacts to heavy traffic. However, an in-house solution requires investment in IT assets and people ready for on-call duty. For this reason, many organizations rely on cloud tools. In short, they avoid buying hardware just for the peak.

Likewise, a cloud structure scales according to demand. During these simulations, check how payment methods and logistics systems respond. In addition, observability correlates logs, metrics, and traces to expose the bottleneck before the customer does. Next, rehearse the contingency plans.

– Make realistic estimates – Ok, you can plan your Black Friday IT. But what will the traffic volume be? Fortunately, that question has an answer. Based on your history from previous years, build pessimistic, realistic, and optimistic projections. They cover simultaneous and total users on the site.

As a result, demand forecasting models make these estimates more accurate. Beyond the history of past editions, AI simulates different peak scenarios. Therefore, the team gets real input for performance testing. The goal is to determine the limit the system can tolerate.

Security and the shopping experience

– Cybersecurity is more than a detail – In a 2021 study, ClearSale recorded a 131.5% rise in Black Friday fraud attempts against 2020. Potentially fraudulent orders went from 51,500 to 119,300 in that comparison. However, the message holds in every edition. In other words, fraud pressure grows along with sales volume.

Meanwhile, security weighs as much as stability in the purchase decision. Denial-of-service attacks and data theft attempts climb on this date. For this reason, zero trust became the baseline: verified identity, least privilege, and network segmentation. In addition, machine learning antifraud scores the risk of each order in real time.

– Guidance – Some fraud does not depend on your business. Fake emails with promotions, charges, order confirmations, or coupons are one example. In this case, guiding consumers is essential. Therefore, tell them which channels your brand actually uses.

– Responsiveness – The purchase happens on a smartphone, notebook, tablet, or app. Consequently, the e-commerce challenge is to deliver the same experience on every path. For this reason, the site must be built responsive from the start, fitting the user’s screen.

In short, responsiveness is not just about displaying information correctly. You also need speed, stability, and security to repeat on any device.

From payment to after-sales

– Support for multiple users – One of IT’s challenges is creating good experiences on Black Friday. Therefore, every effort on this date must sustain the customer relationship. Errors hit brand image and future purchases. We covered this topic in this blog article.

– The payment challenge – Pix, credit card, digital wallets, and bank slips coexist in the Brazilian checkout. In practice, Pix consolidated its place thanks to instant settlement and a lower cost than cards. Therefore, the checkout must handle thousands of transactions without delay, from authorization to confirmation. In addition, plan reconciliation and recurring Pix for subscriptions.

After all, the site’s reputation suffers if the purchase stalls or drags at this moment. In other words, the customer assumes something went wrong and gives up.

– Optimize the email flow – Customers expect purchase confirmation right away. They also want to track delivery without asking for help. Therefore, this flow must be automatic and transparent. In addition, AI agents already triage support tickets and shorten the after-sales queue.

If you are interested, we also covered in another article the losses caused by system instability on Black Friday.

Finally, want to know which solutions Inove Solutions has prepared for this date? See them here

In addition, stay up to date with other IT market news on the Inove Solutions blog. Follow us on social media!