2020 is a year like no other, and the holidays will reflect this, leaving retailers tasked to predict what strategies win over shoppers in this unpredictable season.

In the words of Matthew Shay, president of the NRF – National Retail Federation: 

“The tradition of Thanksgiving weekend holiday shopping has become a five-day event with consumers spending money in stores, supporting local small businesses, and online with their mobile devices and computers.”

Holidays’ scope has grown significantly, and it is also no longer confined just to retail. Nowadays, companies across many industries offer deals and incentives to customers to increase sales of products and services in the last quarter of the year.

This year we need to consider the impact of COVID – 19 with all the restrictions brought to in-store shopping and how it boosted online sales like never before.

Facts from 2019 – 2020 so far

More than 70% of retailers think that this holiday shopping season will be bigger than in 2019 due to COVID.

Last year alone, almost 190 million people went shopping over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday. 

 They spent close to $730 billion, a whopping $101 million per minute, and with the COVID crisis, online sales have dramatically grown throughout the year. 

Retailers 2020 earnings compared to the same fiscal quarter in 2019.

• Home Depot – Sales “leveraging” Home Depot’s digital platforms increased by 100%

• Target – Digital sales increased by 195%

• Best Buy – Online sales increased by 200%

• Walmart – U.S. e-commerce sales grew by 97%

• Amazon – Online product sales increased by 40%

(Note: AWS revenues are not included. Source: DigitalCommerce360.com)

This is clear evidence of how the pandemic growth of E-Commerce and online shopping.

With online sales coming in strong in these COVID times, companies’ most important question is preparing for Holiday Sales. With Cloud infrastructure well established, the main concern now is if services will cope with customer demand in such a crucial time because every second offline could represent losing more than $1.5 million.

And it’s not just about downtime, but also about the time your site takes to load up. With such heavy traffic and so many shoppers trying to find the right fit, that extra 5 seconds might send YOUR customer to the competition.

So, as we can see, the game is no longer getting back online ASAP; that is long gone. The challenge now is to stay up 100% of the time, and this might involve Machine Learning and AI to help your company predict and avoid downtime at all costs.

Today’s modern platform can monitor your company network and understand how it behaves over time, giving your DevOps team the ability to redirect services, clone servers, and reroute applications long before the house is on fire.

In the end, the Holiday sales season can account for up to 30% of annual sales revenue in some industries, so every minute online is critical at this time of the year. There is no magical trick to ensure that buyers have smooth access to your site. And the number of simultaneous tasks can be too much to rely only on your technical team. The best solution is to use a solution that can use Machine Learning to see the patterns and sound the right alarms even before problems happen.

AI, with AIOps solutions, can also increase the ability to respond at a faster pace. It can separate important event alerts from the “noise” of your It environment, Identify root causes and propose solutions for your tech personal and even automate responses, including real-time proactive resolution with no human action needed. 

So this holiday might be the right time to adopt a new way to manage your infrastructure and operations. Being ahead of the competition is always the best strategy. 

Happy holidays everyone!

If you want to learn how to help your company stay online throughout the year and not just the holidays using one of the best AIOps solutions available and with affordable pricing, check out our e-book!