5 Tips to Prepare your Magento Store for the Holiday Season

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, X-mas Sales. Somebody is waiting these days as a great sales opportunity. Somebody is preparing for a sleepless night. We want to share with you a few tips we’ve learned from the collaboration with our customers.

Tip 1. Time Is A King

Guessing, When Is The Right Time To Start Preparation?

Large brands never stop preparation. Once they complete the current sales, they run into analysis and start preparing for the next one.

PREPARATION PERIODS:

• 12 months: Working on lessons learned and data analysis
• 6 months: Run quarterly based system stress tests
• 3 months: Start implementing all technical improvements and the other activities to be ready for holiday sales
• 1.5 months: Confirm Readiness
• Ready and go

Tip 2. Data Analysis

Sales Campaigns Are Generating A Lot Of Information. It The Right Hands It Gives The Power To Be Invincible.

• Data Traffic – understand the overall traffic growth on an annual basis, what number of people/visits/orders we could handle without any issues.
• Order Numbers – understand the traffic quality, conversion rates, average order growth annually, and understand the warehouse and OMS systems bandwidth and limits.
• Overall Infrastructure metrics-understand the current hardware maximum capacity, understand hardware bandwidth.
• Application-Integration bottlenecks – understand application gaps, integration problems, issues that need to be addressed and improved immediately before the next campaign starts.

Tip 3. Plan, Plan, and Plan Again

Large Merchants Are Good At Planning; It’s A Well-Known Fact.

• Plan System Stress Tests(health check regularly) – It helps keep the system in the tone, helps to identify the problem before it appears.
• Plan Application Releases and freezes period – It gives control of what and when will be released, code freeze activities before the sales season starts.
• Plan Organizational Activities – Prepare an action plan for the sales period for all departments, reduce order fulfillment time during sales, minimize department bottlenecks or dependencies.
• Plan Marketing Activities – Prepare a plan for managing marketing campaigns, define email campaign rules, campaign waves/iterations (don’t run everything in a single thread).

Tip 4. Focus On The Right Things

It’s Always Important To Be Focused On The Right Things.

• Focus on Infrastructure improvements and scalability – Add more hardware resources, Introduce autoscaling groups.
• Focus on Application improvements – Tune application performance, Minimize bottleneck risks.
• Focus on Monitoring activities – Implement alerting mechanism, Setup duty teams (structure and responsibility), Introduce monitoring tools (NewRelic, Pingdom, …).
• Escalation procedure – It’s essential to have a clear escalation procedure, know the first contact point for emergency, facilitation person, clearly defined responsibility chain.
• Focus on all departments-, Cross department communication (e.g. Marketing team inform the duty team about the beginning of the marketing campaign)

Tip 5. Stress Testing

It’s Always Important To Know What The System Capacity At Any Moment.

• Health check – It is worth running periodical stress tests and deep infrastructure analysis. It helps identify infrastructure and application bottlenecks, ensuring that the system is ready for high load.
• Procedure training – Run periodic escalation procedure testing. Even if there is no fire, it is worth checking how the fire alarm works. Any problems with the escalation procedure should be identified during testing.

Author:

Alex Karanda

Alex was one of the pioneers in delivering Magento Technical Consultants and professional services. Has 15 years of experience in web development and eCommerce.

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