Opinion: Is your website ready for 31 days of Black Friday?

Around Black Friday a lot of UK ecommerce conversation turns to retailer websites, spikes in demand and whether the major retailers will be able to handle the dramatic increase in load. It’s a question I find quite exacerbating.

This polarising moment highlights how dated a lot of the thinking is in our market and why British retail has to adjust this. In the digital age, your systems should be capable of handling a month of Black Fridays. In this column I’d like to share a few thoughts on why, along with ideas on how you can avoid the black moments that put you in the headlines for the wrong reasons.

The right binoculars

The common view in retail is to wait until the full advantage of depreciation has been realised and a substantial ROI business case can be justified. Legacy systems are left until they are creaking, straining at the verge of collapse. In these lean times, it’s the financially prudent operating approach, right?

Wrong.

I see that as incredibly shortsighted. Today we have different – and better – tools with which to execute. It’s a line of thinking that completely overlooks the commercial advantages technology delivers and the flexibility it brings to managing consumer relationships and building customer confidence. Look through the lens of being a technology business that ships a product, rather than a product business that uses some technology, and your ability to realise Black Friday-style peaks dramatically increases.

Winners in 2016

In my view, it’s all about planning and risk management. This is the key to success. Digital directors have a responsibility to put plans in place that ensure customers are delighted, success is achieved, and there are no excuses. With this in mind, here are the key areas that will help you ensure you’re ready:

Technology – Make it a central focus. There is no excuse for any large organisation to run out of capacity or have an outage on their website. At Kiddicare, we built in capacity to handle multiple times the current performance. Our mindset was to continually improve systems, so we never put anything in without thinking through how it would be replaced. Every year, every piece of capability was evaluated. Was it still fit for purpose? Was there anything better in the market? Would it let us scale up by three, or even 400%, beyond current performance? If the answer to these questions prompted even the slightest bit of doubt, we looked to replace. You should do the same. Sure, this put extra cost into the business, but it also gives you financial incentive, the ability to absorb peaks without breaking the customer experience, and allows the framework to grow aggressively.

”There is no excuse for any large organisation to run out of capacity or have an outage on their website”

Product – Are your products prepared and merchandised correctly, both in store and online? The best teams have multichannel leadership at board level to prevent siloed behaviour and institute cross-channel thinking. Work with your suppliers to make sure products need the minimum amount of repackaging before distribution. This should be covering the basics but, nevertheless, should be checked.

Delivery – It’s great taking all the orders that customers can place but have you prepared your warehouse, logistics and drivers? Do you have a bad weather forecast system (not as crazy as it seems), and have you got a plan in place? Smart retailers also adjust their picking system to pick within the hour, up until 11pm. Not only does this accelerate in-day trading, it also relieves pressure the following working day when the first picks are already done. If you’re having to queue traffic this is a clear indication that your infrastructure isn’t scalable enough – a situation that will be increasingly unacceptable. To put this in perspective, have you ever been queued when logging on to Facebook at the same time as a billion other users?

”Have you ever been queued when logging on to Facebook at the same time as a billion other users?”

Customer service – All of the above is great but, if something were to go wrong, how would you cope? Make sure you have capacity you can tap into at short notice in your customer services department. Be sure you can scale up (and down) and react to any situation, should it happen (website outage, delivery issues, etc). It’s the only way to ensure you’re always on the front foot. There was a huge amount of bad press last year. Make sure your organisation is not the one on the front pages this year.

After 20 years in home shopping and digital retail, I understand the importance of trading peak periods as hard as you can while also maintaining some level of balance across your business. However, I’ve never allowed legacy systems to be a blocker for my team and encourage you to do the same. Indeed, when I look across my start-up portfolio and the new generations of businesses coming up, they are all designed to scale automatically – in theory, to unlimited volumes. Peaks in trading or sudden growth in volume are built in as the new normal.

Given where we are today it’s incredible to me that we’re still talking about this, but any retail business that needs to be able to handle sudden or dramatic peaks in trading has to put technology at the heart of the operation. Last year, many organisations went into meltdown during Black Friday and the peak period because of C-suite decisions that didn’t ensure capacity was in place. If you’re a British retailer that hasn’t learnt from these mistakes, Black Friday will only be the first of many dark days this peak.

• Scott Weavers-Wright is chairman of Elevaate (@elevaatehq) and founder of Haatch (@haatch). Follow him on Twitter @scottww