Whitepaper by Netacea | Black Friday. Challenges & Opportunities by conclubiltz

NETACEA / WHITE PAPER

BLACK FRIDAY CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

TRUSTED BY LEADING BRANDS

BACKGROUND In 2017 Black Friday was the single largest cause of web traffic spikes and website outages in the retail industry. Most online retailers receive a spike in website traffic of 10x normal levels. This is what makes Black Friday break shopping records year after year, and fuels longer flash sale periods spanning the week prior to the traditional one-day Black Friday event. It also brings danger and disruption as many websites do not have the infrastructure to support such huge surges in visitors. This year 83% of customers are primed to spend more than last year and UK sales are predicted to exceed £1bn again. Spikes in traffic present both challenges and opportunities to the retail industry. If proactive and pre-emptive solutions are not in place, spikes in inbound web traffic can put additional strains on the website experience when website and app infrastructure cannot support the additional visitors. The leads to a poor customer experience, website or app failure, and of course impacts revenue, customer satisfaction and brand reputation. This paper will highlight the risks traffic spikes pose to your e-commerce website, provide you with best practice mitigation strategies, and will show why a Virtual Waiting Room is key to ensuring website uptime and high levels of performance during the Holiday shopping season.

BLACK FRIDAY BY THE NUMBERS ONE OF THE BIGGEST E-COMMERCE SPENDING DAYS OF THE YEAR Online retailers plan and make improvements throughout the year in preparation for Black Friday. It is hardly surprising when you consider that customers in the US spent over $3million dollars per minute on eCommerce sites during Black Friday 2017, totaling over $5billion dollars spent during the sales event¹.

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In the UK there were similar numbers with £1.4billion (circa $1.9 billion) being spent over the day at £1 million per minute. When taking into consideration that the UK adult population is just 20% of the size of that of the US, these figures illustrate just how important Black Friday is to the UK eCommerce economy². Black Friday revenues are growing year on year but also customer behaviour is evolving. Prior to 2017, the most common user behaviour was for consumers to use mobile devices to browse for their shopping bargains however then turn to a physical PC to complete their shopping and place payment. This was different in 2017, just as in previous years half of all web traffic was from a mobile device, however over 42% of all checkouts were now placed from a mobile device or tablet, showing the huge pressures retailers must take to ensure a perfect omnichannel shopping experience³. HOW MUCH WEBSITE TRAFFIC SHOULD YOU EXPECT AND PLAN FOR? Year on year, our news reports show in-store chaos at numerous Black Friday sales events as consumer battle to get their hands on the latest promotional sales. It is therefore not surprising to see an increased proportion of all Black Friday spending coming through online channels rather than in bricks and mortar stores, especially as the consumer can shop at multiple websites at the same time rather than one physical store at a time. With the increased move to mobile computing internet traffic is increasing year on year, still proving to be a problem for even the latest retail websites with the vastest amounts of resource and infrastructure still falling victim to website slowdowns, the page hangs at checkout and eventually full website failure. Our average customer numbers show website traffic to be on average between 10 and 30 times higher on Black Friday compared to other sales days. It is uneconomical to provide enough infrastructure to cope with Black Friday spikes all year round, and auto-scaling of elastic resourced can be too slow in reacting to sudden spikes, and by the time more infrastructure has come online, the traffic spike has already crashed the existing web servers. The obvious solution would be to scale in advance of the sales event, but not all existing infrastructure is 100% scalable as they are not cloud-ready, and even if they were, could still be subject to extreme spikes. Even if the additional load bearing servers come into production in time, the systems they integrate with such as payment processing could become the next bottleneck. Either of these situations could severely damage the remainder of your Holiday Season eCommerce plans once consumer faith in your systems has been lost.

CHALLENGES The most important operational challenges for online retailers this Holiday Season are ensuring 100% website uptime and preventing website slowdown and doing all this in a timely and economical manner. Maximising availability and performance are essential to maximise revenue but overspending on infrastructure eats into profits. Holiday season should be peak season for online retailers, website failure can wipe out that peak and there are plenty of competitors there waiting to pick up the pieces. PROTECTING WEBSITE UPTIME Website downtime costs retailers an average of £57,000 per hour on Black Friday, which is £1.3m for the day. Not only do website crashes result in a loss of revenue from missed conversions, but they also leave customers dissatisfied, more likely to complain and less likely to return. There are also resource costs associated with fixing and maintaining websites following a crash. To make things worse, advertising budget pushing product purchases is wasted and could even send customers to competitors, helping them maximise revenue while your business is left fixing the eCommerce platform.

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PREVENTING WEBSITE SLOWDOWN The load time of web pages is important because almost eight in 10 customers are less likely to buy from a slow site. As a server approaches maximum capacity, the load speed slows, creating a poorer customer experience. More Black Friday Week product price drops happen online than in store, and as a result, online customers demand better service from eCommerce website than ever before to ensure they are in a fair position to purchase the item as soon as the price is reduced before it sells out. Amongst many other benefits. improving online service translates into decreasing load times and making payment simple and easy. Did you know mobile customers expect web pages to load in less than four seconds? A one-second delay on average cause a 7% reduction in conversions. It is however also essential to understand that performance slowdowns are progressive, and therefore the impact of poor performance will also be non-linear. A one-second slowdown will not be the same between 3 and 4 seconds as between 8 and 9 seconds and 14 and 15 seconds. There comes a point where the benefit of flowing additional users through the system is outweighed by the impact on performance and therefore conversion. Careful management of this can ensure maximum throughput of transactions SCALING WEBSITE INFRASTRUCTURE Scaling a website’s infrastructure to match peak traffic can be uneconomical. The traditional approach was to estimate how much capacity would be needed and then ensure that enough infrastructure was in place to sufficiently deliver that capacity (plus some assumed growth and contingency). This approach when applied to large, short-term spikes results in oversized infrastructure and wasted costs. A new approach is needed in capacity management. You need to evaluate the benefit of the additional traffic v the cost of providing for it. There are then three ways of managing this: 1. Controlling the flow of users in by staggering advertising and lengthening promotions although this not always be possible during a competitive sale event such as Black Friday. 2. Elastically scaling infrastructure (may not always be possible 3. Managing the flow of users into the website with a Virtual Waiting Room solution.

Visual Diagram Displaying Web Traffic and Capacity

This diagram displays a double failure. Not only are costs being wasted by providing excessive infrastructure through the rest of the year, despite those increased costs it is still not scaled enough to deliver for peak spikes. A Virtual Waiting Room Queuing solution enables businesses to maximise their throughput of customers to increase transactions during Black Friday with 100% website uptime guaranteed.

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ONLINE SALES OPPORTUNITIES There was a 12% rise in online spending on Black Friday 2017 vs 2016 – this is a 220% increase on a regular Friday. In the UK, it is estimated £1.23bn was spent online on the day and £6.5bn over Black Friday week, retailers can clearly generate a lot of revenue for themselves.

Average Spend During Black Friday

Online retail by customers using mobile apps is continuing to rise, last year there were 1.2m instances of retail-based apps installed in 24 hours demonstrating that retailers must accommodate omnichannel platforms for their customers to make payments. This includes their mobile app experience must also respond to users actions in a fast manner, just like a traditional website shopping experience.

HOW TO ENSURE UPTIME AND PERFORMANCE PERFORMANCE ASSURANCE TESTING Simulate visitors to your website to see what volume your site can handle. Use this information to inform redevelopment. If your website’s breaking point is lower than your expected volumes of traffic, then explore short-term fixes prior to Black Friday. NETACEA.COM

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CONTROL BOT TRAFFIC Reducing the number of bots on your server infrastructure allows more online shoppers to access your website. This helps maximise Black Friday sales revenues and mitigate the risk of server slow down or failure. With a bot management solution such as Netacea Bot Management, you can identify and control the non-human website hitting your web platform and establish rules to maximise sales on Black Friday. IMPLEMENT A VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM The ultimate failsafe to ensure your site speed does not slow down, and your servers do not fail, is to implement the Netacea Virtual Waiting Room solution to provide online queuing when the number of visitors exceeds your infrastructure capacity. It keeps your site trading with a full quota of paying customers no matter how much traffic hits on Black Friday by activating a fair queuing system when your website reaches its capacity threshold. Protect customer experience with a customisable HTML-based page which follows your brand guidelines presented to queuing customers. To minimize the bounce rate to competitor websites information about deals and products along with expected waiting time can be displayed to customers.

THE VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM A Virtual Waiting Room (VWR) is a layer designed specifically to protect website infrastructure from being overloaded by spikes in traffic larger than what the computing resource can handle and process. Online queues are configured with the VWR to immediately kick in when a set number of visitor connections are made to the website, mobile backend or API. Any additional visitors after the VWR has become active are redirected to a safe landing page where they are put in a first-in-first-out queue and are granted access to the website when resource and capacity become available. With a VWR in place, websites are fully protected from any surprise spikes in traffic, services remain available to customers, those in a queue are kept informed of what is happening and every customer will receive the best possible experience once onto the website.

Visual Diagram To illustrate the Queuing Process

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NETACEA – THE WORLDS MOST ADVANCED VIRTUAL WAITING ROOM The Netacea founders designed and implemented several bespoke online waiting systems for some of the most demanding retail and ticketing companies. It was through these experiences, observations and successes Netacea productised the most successful approach and built the Netacea Virtual Waiting Room – the world leading, non-skippable, secure queueing solution. Having worked with some of Europe’s largest retailers as well as high-profile ticketing platforms and venues around the globe, Netacea is well equipped to not only help you prepare for peak online sale events, but also be your first line of defence from spikes in traffic or malicious bots. Netacea’s Virtual Waiting Room is a cloud-based service that sits in front of your website, mobile backend and APIs, controlling the flow of visitors, guaranteeing a positive customer omni-channel experience even under extreme conditions such as Black Friday.

DNS-BASED FOR RAPID IMPLEMENTATION AND ENTERPRISE WIDE PROTECTION IMPLEMENTATION The Virtual Waiting Room can be implemented in minutes as it does not require any code changes to your website, merely a single redirection protects all your web infrastructure, enabling our larger customers to deploy to 10,000’s sites in a single, rapid implementation. Having worked with some of the world’s largest retailers as well as high-profile ticketing platforms, the Virtual Waiting Room works seamlessly with most CDNs and platforms such as Magento, IBM Commerce, Fastly, CloudFlare, SalesForce/ Demandware and more. With mobile native app support your mobile customers are protected with the same fair queue as your online customers. FULL STACK PROTECTION Sitting in front of the infrastructure allows the Virtual Waiting Room to provide additional protection for load balancers, WAFs (web application firewalls) and app and database servers; not just the website. Inspecting all requests that pass in and out of the web server ensures full visibility and control of all traffic and therefore ensures an accurate number of visitors on any part of a site at any one time.

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SECURITY AND SCALABILITY As with any enterprise-class solution, the Virtual Waiting Room is not only secure, it’s completely scalable. Any requests that pass through the system are HTTPS encrypted and never stored, enabling us to be PCI compliant. The solution is hosted on highly available, distributed cloud infrastructure (with complete failover protection), this has enabled it to achieve 100% availability since inception in 2014 and has been load tested to over 1 million concurrent users with no performance degradation.

Visual Diagram to illustrate The Netacea Virtual Waiting Room Implementation

CUSTOMISABLE WAITING EXPERIENCE Inform your customers with a branded queuing screen detailing their place in the queue and the estimated waiting time. The waiting room page is fully configurable and completely white-labeled allowing your visitor’s waiting room experience to be consistent with your brand and giving you the scope to entertain waiting visitors with videos, Twitter feeds, games or special offers.

E-commerce Queuing Template

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BENEFITS OF A DNS BASED SOLUTION COMPARED TO THE ALTERNATIVES INCREASED CONTROL - Only a DNS based approach will ensure full visibility and control of all traffic. All requests passing in and out of the system are inspected, enabling an accurate number of visitors on any part of the site at any one time. ENHANCED QUEUE SECURITY - Being in-line at a DNS level improves security by allowing you to restrict access to your system to only the IP addresses of the Netacea platform. This means that no one can bypass the Virtual Waiting Room. FULL STACK PROTECTION - By positioning the solution in the cloud in front the infrastructure you can provide protection for load balancers, web application firewalls, application and database servers, not just the website. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND TRUST - In-line DNS integrates as a seamless layer into the customers purchasing journey. Our customers do not have to worry about their buyers becoming suspicious of being directed to external URLs, e.g. www. VirtualWaitingRoom.CustomerWebsiteName.com EASY & SPEED OF IMPLEMENTATION - DNS does not require any code changes to the website, a single redirection covers all aspects of the web infrastructure, enabling our larger customers to deploy to 10,000’s sites in a single, rapid implementation. ACHIEVE COMPLIANCE - Requests pass through the solution as encrypted HTTPS traffic, but are not stored, enabling the solution to be both PCI and GDPR compliant. UNRIVALLED 100% WEBSITE UPTIME - Hosting the solution on a highly available, distributed cloud infrastructure with complete fail over protection has enabled a DNS solution to achieve 100% availability since inception. ULTRA-LOW LATENCY - Proven to perform all interactions sub 1ms in front of some of the world’s busiest websites. SUPERIOR SCALABILITY - Further to customer reports, DNS solutions have been load tested to over 2 million concurrent users with no sign of performance degradation or instability. GUARANTEED BUSINESS USER ACCESS - The ability to whitelist specific users or locations ensures that no in-store or call centre employee is placed within a waiting room when trying to place a customer order or access stocking information. INSTANT ACCESS FOR VIP CUSTOMERS - Returning or high-spend customers can be rewarded with guaranteed direct access to the website in any given situation, rewarding those loyal to your business. INSTANT REMOVAL - The DNS based solution, combined with Netacea’s passive mode functionality, allows for the Virtual Waiting Room to be instantly added or removed to your website at the click of a button.

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SUMMARY It has never been more important to ensure 100% website availability. In the modern digital world, consumers are accustomed to gaining access to information, entertainment and items of desire in near real time. Failure to provide immediate access to website shops, limited edition product ranges and discounted sales events can be detrimental to brand reputation and repeat custom. Even a one-second delay in load time can result in a 7% loss in conversions and a two-second delay during a transaction results in shopping cart abandonment rates of up to 87% as customers fear something has gone wrong with the transaction and abandon their purchase. Psychological research has proven when people experience a period of waiting with no explanation as to why they are waiting or how long they are going to wait, it feels longer than waiting for the same period when they have been told how long they can expect to wait. Nobody likes waiting, so when selecting a Virtual Waiting Room solution, select one that matches your business objectives, and one that makes the waiting process as fair, transparent and painless as possible. A Virtual Waiting Room solution will prevent a disaster and maintain income even when traffic exceeds capacity. It allows you to take control of your server traffic to ensure that what should be the busiest time of your year is not actually a loss-making time of year Selecting a proven, scalable Virtual Waiting Room solution will protect the uptime, availability and performance of web applications. Therefore, will help maximise customer transactions and safeguard brand reputation through customisable access rules during spikes in traffic this Black Friday and Holiday Season.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR | NETACEA Netacea prevent website overload during peak traffic spikes. Netacea was founded by those who designed and implemented the Glastonbury ticketing system. They realised that for many businesses, technology ability and performance meant the difference between success and failure and developed the world’s most advanced and secure, non-skippable virtual waiting room solution. Netacea continue to safeguard the world’s leading websites from traffic overload and guarantee a positive customer omni-channel experience, even under extreme conditions such as Black Friday. REFERENCES: 1. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/24/black-friday-deals-net-640m-in-sales-so-far-mobile-60-of-all-traffic/ 2. https://ingenico.co.uk/company/press-releases/local/2017/black-friday-2017-results.html 3. https://www.demandware.com/blog/retail-intelligence/holiday-shopping-flash-report-black-friday-sales-up-24-digital-clearlydominates-the-season

Netacea prevents website overload with a cloud-based Virtual Waiting Room that sits in front of your website, mobile app and APIs to control the flow of visitors. It will guarantee a positive customer experience, even under extreme conditions.

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