The months from October to December are traditionally the busiest time of year for retailers as bargain-hungry customers take advantage of widespread discounting.

The period includes increasingly globalised retail-focused events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as the December holidays and sales periods running into the new year. This period always promises high-demand, and online retailers needs to be able to handle the surge to take advantage of it.

However, as consumers impacted by cost-of-living squeezes take a more considered approach to how they spend their money, retailers must be smarter, and more data driven. Those which are able to harness the masses of consumer buying data will be able to take a more precise and personalised approach, demonstrating value and convincing cautious buyers to engage.

The IT backbone is key

If there’s one thing that’s certain about 2024’s holiday shopping period, it’s that a retailer’s IT and data backbone will be paramount in capturing the opportunity of increased demand and converting sales.

In a trend that has continued for the past few years, the peaks of activity on individual holiday shopping ‘fire sales’, such as Black Friday, are smoothing out. It’s no longer a one-day event, but increasingly spread over weeks and even months to gain a competitive advantage.

Consumers increasingly rely on online channels to decide what (and where) to buy, and research the options available. While previous technological concerns for retailers focused simply on preparing for and staying operational during short-lived peaks in traffic, this activity is less predictable.

The holiday sales season is not just about resilience, but intelligence, analysing customer journeys, buyer behaviour, and adapting strategies throughout this extended period.

Preparing for success

At a base level, retailers need to be preparing their systems to handle not just the high intensity of traffic, but also the unpredictability of when these spikes will occur. When things go wrong and service is impacted during a high-traffic sales period, retailers don’t have the luxury of days to find out what happened and fix it.

Retailers need to establish real-time monitoring, simulating user behaviour, and testing traffic loads well in advance. This, in turn, will establish greater confidence in their ability to cruise smoothly over any issues caused by expected peaks in traffic.

This is where AI-driven monitoring and observability is proving valuable in an ecommerce environment. IT systems have become far more complex than humans can manage alone, so deploying AI is becoming mandatory to prevent or resolve incidents.

Ideally, retailers should strive to be in a position where AI can fix issues before they impact the customer experience, or at the very least provide the root cause, context, and solution to the IT team so that resolving incidents happens in near real-time.

Data-driven insights add significant value

In some respects, the holiday shopping rush is a high-intensity microcosm of year-long buying behaviours among returning customers. However, whether net-new customers or occasional spenders, retailers are in a battle to convert cautious or opportunistic purchases.

When discretionary spending is under pressure, a targeted and considered approach is paramount. Research highlights that the average cart abandonment rate in Australia stands at a staggering 72.4%[1], meaning most website visitors who put an item in their cart will leave without completing the purchase. Converting sales is becoming more difficult, but it’s easier than ever to lose one.

By investing in IT observability, retailers can go several steps further in preparing themselves to capitalise on the golden quarter. Every click, tap or swipe on the customer journey tells a story.

It’s crucial that retailers can see this journey from end-to-end, presented within context of their wider business data, to build up a picture of how every single customer is navigating and engaging with the sale, whether that be on the primary website or on the brand’s mobile application.

Snapshots of the customer experience are useful if it helps to pinpoint an issue, but insight into the end-to-end digital customer journey allows a retailer to build a picture of its customers’ behaviour and implement proactive measures to capitalise on opportunities to increase sales.

Retailers can capture and visually replay a complete digital experience for every user, flagging the friction points causing cart abandonment. Perhaps pages are difficult to navigate, mobile users are responding differently to certain promotions, or certain payment options are causing unnecessary friction. This detailed level of insight will set the winners apart, enabling them to deliver the most proactive, seamless, and precise digital experience to convert sales.

The retailers that invest in extracting insights and answers from their data will be the ones that will reap the greatest rewards this holiday shopping season and beyond.

Andrew Foot is regional vice president of sales for Australia and New Zealand at Dynatrace.

[1] https://ecommercedb.com/benchmarks/au/all