Two-Minute Toolkit: Optimizing E-Commerce for Black Friday

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday a few days away, many e-commerce sites are already trying to ramp up traffic that converts to more sales -- but what if lagging storefronts get in the way?

In the early days of e-commerce, some retail sites crumbled during the holidays, suffering sluggish response times and crashes as shoppers flooded online. Consumers may be even less tolerant these days for slowdowns and broken websites during peak holiday shopping periods. The expectation of placing orders fast through mobile and other devices has ramped up with the opportunity to capture sales narrowing with customer attention spans.

The availability of scaling data storage, cloud-based services, and other resources should make it easier for e-commerce to adjust with increased demand, yet there may always be room for further digital improvement.

Guillermo Rauch, Vercel’s CEO and founder, spoke in the latest Two-Minute Toolkit about some of the concerns e-commerce companies face during the holidays with rising traffic, the need to convert visits to sales, and maintaining digital storefronts that can deliver during peak hours.