Get ready now to offer a better e-Commerce experience on Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday

Six months to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As far as it may seem, the wheels of the entire e-commerce industry have started to turn, shifting the focus from projections and forecasts to tactical decisions on how to improve operations within budget.

With that in mind, here are some things you can do right now to get ready for this year.

1. Increase your IT budget by improving reliability during peak loads

For ecommerce sites, there is always a struggle between performance / reliability improvements and IT / infrastructure budget. In larger organizations these functions are managed by separate divisions and are often isolated, making it difficult to achieve full transparency. The goal across the organization - to sell more - may be the same, but that hasn't incentivized the clearing of silos. For smaller sites and organizations, few people have full visibility and the challenge comes as a budget allocation problem. Either way, the problem is how do you improve performance and reliability without spending too much? 

Many ecommerce sites have turned to commercial CDN or caching services to improve performance and reliability. For quick rollouts these are great options, but as you grow, so do your costs. One of the things you can do right now is look for software-defined solutions, like Varnish, with service-based server pricing that allows you to use your entire infrastructure investment. From a buckling point of view, Varnish allows you to scale as far as your servers and network can support without increasing throughput costs. Plus, Varnish installs on any hardware and can work with your current commercial CDN and caching services, eliminating the hassle of ripping and replacing existing approaches.

2. Optimize for mobile commerce while improving performance

One of the most recent challenges for ecommerce sites has been to keep pace with the growth of mobile commerce. The reason is that, unless you are a new company, you have some level of technical debt to contend with. In other words, the investments you've made to optimize desktop shopping, which should have lasted three to five years, are being challenged by the rapid growth of mobile commerce. In the United States alone, mobile commerce is projected to exceed $ 2022 billion in 430, and by 2025 that figure is expected to grow nearly double to over $ 700 billion. How do you make sure that at least some of the investments you are making today help grow your mobile business in the future?

To ensure that the technology you use to improve performance supports your evolving needs in the future, it must be highly customizable. While there has been a consolidation in mobile OS platforms over the years, there are still various resolutions, devices, networks, and applications that need to be supported. This is one of the reasons why our open source product is used by nearly 20% of the world's top 10.000 websites. It is highly customizable and can be used to ensure the best customer experience regardless of device. This is enabled by Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), which can be used to customize performance and reliability to suit your needs. Varnish takes it one step further and gives you access to plugins called VMODs that allow you to quickly deploy hundreds of beneficial features and services.

3. Layer security transparently and seamlessly

In today's world, protecting your assets isn't enough. You also need to know how and where the security technology you use was developed and identify potential backdoor and vulnerability risks. You also need to be able to use security features in a non-disruptive manner as close to the source of the threat as possible.

Many of the VMODs offered through Varnish focus on resource protection and service availability. This includes SSL / TLS support, AES 256-bit encryption, and a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that protects against DDoS and any other malicious requests at the edge before they reach the origin application or servers. These are all features that can be added to existing processes without having to modify applications.

Get ready for the madness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

With the approach of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we know time is of the essence.

But if you want to do something this week, you can arrange a call with one of our experts. If you're already using Varnish Cache, we can further improve your page load times, reduce latency, help support the evolving needs of mobile commerce, and improve security so you can deliver a better customer experience. And we can do it quickly.

If you are not currently a Varnish user and want to get started right away, you can request a free consultation.

Either way, we can't wait to talk to you!