Every business has its own Black Friday
Three things to consider as you plan for your own peak trading time
Black Friday has come and gone. Your inbox is no longer inundated with “ACT NOW!” one-day only email deals. Images of shoppers fighting over a 50” flat screen have faded into yesterday’s news. If you’re a retailer, you may be cleaning up the confetti and streamers from your record-setting-sales-day after party. Or, if you weren’t so lucky, cleaning up the revenue, social media and PR mess from a site crash during peak trading.
If you’re not a retailer chances are the day may have passed you by without much thought on your part (aside, perhaps, from snagging a great deal on a new Surface Pro 4). Certainly it wasn’t nearly as stressful a period for you as it has been for the folks whose entire year’s sales plan is made or missed over this short window. While it may not be a big deal for you, but you probably have your own version of Black Friday: a critical time of the year when volumes, opportunities and stress spike.
In travel, for instance you can expect January to be the prime month for Brits booking their summer holidays, and August to be the month when they travel overseas (a 60% spike over average, and 150% over the December). For automobile dealers in the UK, changes in registration plates lead to spikes in March and September (which can account for up to 40% of all car sales). If you’re in logistics, you’re managing peak times that coincide with the UK’s farm season (spring-summer) and Christmas (October to December). So while you might not see the 6-fold increase in traffic that Black Friday retailers have experienced, here are 3 things to consider in dealing with your own peak trading times.
Scale up quickly for peak demand
Even with the advanced notice and high expectations for online traffic this Black Friday, there were still some high-profile retailers whose sites struggled (and failed) to keep up with demand. With each minute of downtime costing businesses £5,800 or more in lost revenue, the financial impact of a crashed site is fairly clear. But what about the costs of non-peak times? For businesses that have invested in physical on-premises infrastructure to meet their peak demand, there are long periods of time when those servers are just sitting there, underutilised, and costing you money.
If you have a business that experiences cycles of peaks and valleys in demand, it’s important to plan for both so that you can scale up and scale back quickly. But what if you experience an unplanned spike in demand: an unexpected celebrity endorsement, or a new report touting your products’ benefits? You also want to have a computing, storage and bandwidth solution in place in place that can adjust to automatically meet your needs.
Stay secure during peak: protect your data
Peak trading times usually means a higher interaction with customer data. This increased interaction, whether via automated transactions and processes, or through direct employee touch, can also lead to increased security risk. Additionally, as many businesses focus primarily on handing volume during peak trading, attention can be pulled away from making sure your data is secure. Having a scalable cloud-based solution only works if you can trust the security of your cloud provider. That’s why Microsoft has made an industry-leading commitment to the protection and privacy of your data. We were the first cloud provider recognised by the European Union’s data protection authorities for our commitment to rigorous EU privacy laws. Microsoft was also the first major cloud provider to adopt the new international cloud privacy standard, ISO 27018.
Leverage analytics to maximise peak trading
For many businesses, just being able to manage peak trading volumes securely is a sign of success. An important lesson many retailers learned from Black Friday was the need to better understand their data: how Black Friday promotions will impact Boxing Day sales, for instance. In a recent article by Marketing Week, “Why retailers will regret creating Black Friday” – the author points to some of the challenges that arise from less-than-optimal analytics. How well you do things such as inventory forecasting, logistics planning, creating the right product mix and serving up marketing offers at the right time all rely on your analytics capability.
In other words, it’s crucial to take full advantage of your data go from just managing peak times to maximising them. With Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, businesses can turn data into insight through Azure’s analytics services including Machine Learning, Cortana Analytics and Stream Analytics.
Is your business ready for peak?
So whether your business has a predictable trading cycle or if you’re charting new territories and unanticipated opportunities, consider a solution that helps you not just survive peak trading, but to thrive in them as well.
Learn how Microsoft Azure can help you thrive during peak trading
