By David Moore, client services manager, Roq, the quality engineering consultancy
So, Black Friday (or moreover, month, as it tends to be these days) and Cyber Monday has been and gone, leaving many of us penniless and online retailers scratching their heads as to why their plans went awry.
As we know, Black Friday can be an amazing time to snap up that item you’ve been longing for at a rather attractive price. But for some retailers and technology companies, it can provide some serious headaches – especially when consumers want to buy goods but can’t. Profits, reputation, and brands are instantly damaged by something which need not have happened.
Roq recently predicted the main technology disasters organisations may face over this period, highlighting website crashes and cyber-attacks to name just a couple.
Things didn’t exactly go to plan for some big brand names who had lengthy virtual queues and angry social media posts to contend with from the sheer volume of shoppers attempting to snap up a bargain. One online retailer that started their Black Friday sale very early, to get ahead of the curve with a rock-bottom price offer, resulted in their customers seeing a ‘503 Service Temporarily Available’ error screen before they were sadly informed that the item they wanted was sold out. The 503 error only caused a minute or so or delay, but that was long enough for shoppers to be left disgruntled and taking to chat rooms asking if it was all just a “data phishing marketing gimic”.
And of course, nobody expected one of the UK’s biggest banks to experience an outage causing internal system problems. A double-whammy – not only Black Friday, but also pay day for many.
If you were one of the unlucky ones, and your Black Friday sales were interrupted, it’s unfortunately too late to change things now. However, starting early and engineering quality into your Black Friday (and indeed any) sales strategy is key, so here are some things you should be thinking about now in order to ensure your 2024 Black Friday is more successful than ever before.
Build in quality from the start
As with anything, quality should be considered from the beginning of the project. Work out what quality looks like to your organisation for this specific project and refer to that consistently throughout the project lifecycle. You should also be engaging with all parts of your business to get their perspective on this – including quality or test teams.
Don’t look back in anger
Post-event analysis or retrospective meetings should be taking place right now, giving you immediate feedback on what went wrong this year and highlighting the key issues to prevent from occurring next year. And as above, all parts of the business should be included in this session to ensure nothing is missed.
How do you perform under pressure?
Load testing is a key part of Black Friday success as we see huge volumes of traffic coming on to our websites and apps. But beyond this, can your internal systems handle the load? One of the main issues we see on Black Friday is payment systems crashing, and customers abandoning baskets as they simply can’t pay.
Scalability
Have scalable infrastructure in place to accommodate for the sudden spikes in traffic. Many cloud-based solutions will provide the flexibility required for such situations.
Consider test automation
Test automation can provide quicker feedback on the quality of your websites, systems and apps which could pinpoint a system critical defect and prevent a major disaster at this crucial time of year for your business. In addition to this, the automated test packs can be developed way in advance of Black Friday, allowing your test team to focus on other key areas when it matters most.
Is your site mobile?
Do not overlook your mobile platforms, apps, etc. More and more people are shopping while on the move, on their phones or tablets, and any oversight could prove extremely costly for your business, in both financial terms and brand reputational damage.
There are many more areas you could focus your attentions on in the lead up to Black Friday, or any big sales event, including cyber security, customer support, monitoring and alerts, etc. It really depends on your business and the type of issues your specific company may face. Overall, we’d suggest that the earlier you think about this and the more you really engineer quality into your organisation, the more successful your Black Friday will be.
To discover more ways in which Roq can support your business, head to our services page or reach out to a member of the team for a discussion – ask@roq.co.uk