How System Failures Could Crush Your Cyber Monday Profits. Here’s What the World’s Biggest Retailers Need to Consider

The CrowdStrike incident this past summer sent ripples across industries, exposing cybersecurity vulnerabilities that affected businesses of all sizes. Here’s how retailers can learn from the incident ahead of the busiest season of the year.

In the Wake of CrowdStrike ...

With Cyber Monday just around the corner, the pressure is on for e-commerce performance. In 2023, we saw record-breaking sales during the holiday, with actual sales surpassing initial projections by $400 million. The CrowdStrike incident this past summer reminded businesses that even small hiccups can lead to major impacts. For retailers, that could even mean being unable to process transactions during critical shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, resulting in lost sales and unhappy customers. Looking at historical sales data for Cyber Monday, if a company like Amazon.com had an outage for even one single minute during the shopping event, it could stand to lose around $3.78 million in sales.

But here’s the thing: resilience isn’t just about mitigating outages; it’s also about exceeding soaring customer expectations, day in and day out. The CrowdStrike incident emphasized the critical importance of continuous monitoring and proactive performance testing — a million dollars a minute is a gamble that retailers want to avoid.

Findings From the World’s Biggest Retailers

When it comes to e-commerce and customer service, your website performance holds immense power. Even the world’s biggest retailers are susceptible to performance gaps — whether in DNS lookup time, Time to First Byte, or the overall load time — that can make or break customer loyalty during high-traffic periods like Cyber Monday. A recent report benchmarking athletic footwear and apparel website performance evaluated leading sportswear brands Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and others during August 2024. In the analysis, Under Armour and Kappa led against competitors in homepage efficiency, while Nike and Converse have opportunities for further optimization to enhance their user experience during high-traffic events. With an estimated $75 billion in sales on the line this Cyber Monday weekend, the stakes of web performance only increase as we approach the 2024 holiday season.

Why should online retailers care about performance metrics like “Time to First Byte” (the amount of time it takes for a website to start loading after someone clicks a link) or “Largest Contentful Paint” (how long it takes for the main content of a page to load)? Because milliseconds matter. When 40 percent of consumers won't wait more than three seconds before abandoning a site, any lag can cause shoppers to bounce right along to competitors — meaning a loss of revenue, or worse, a loss of brand trust. In tests, the athletic footwear and apparel analysis showed that the top performers consistently loaded their homepages within three seconds, maintaining a smooth, user-friendly experience. Those lagging behind saw higher bounce rates, missed conversions, and frustrated consumers. In fact, research shows that almost half of customers (46 percent) won’t revisit a website again if they’ve encountered slow loading speeds in the past.

Start Early and Stay Proactive

For retailers in a web-dependent world, being prepared means building digital resilience through proactive testing and monitoring web performance — an essential to staying competitive. To stay ahead of major events, start with these steps:

1. Strategize ongoing performance monitoring. Set up continuous monitoring for key metrics to quickly spot and fix any issues before they impact customers.
2. Use industry benchmarks. Regularly compare website performance to industry standards. Use data from trusted resources to guide goals and improvements.
3. Listen to user feedback. Gather and analyze user feedback to identify pain points and prioritize which areas need optimization.
4. Conduct regular performance audits. Review CDN provider and server configurations regularly to ensure optimal performance metrics.

As customers click “add to cart,” make sure your website is up to the task. The difference between a sale and a lost customer could be just a few milliseconds. But beyond pure speed, a successful web performance strategy is about being prepared for anything, at any time — including a sudden surge in traffic for Cyber Monday. A fast, resilient website is more than a luxury; it can make or break your competitive edge during the busiest retail season of the year.

Mehdi Daoudi is the CEO and founder of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring solution.