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Best Buy Holiday Readiness: An Interview with Andrew ...
Akamai has been proudly partnering with Best Buy on eCommerce holiday preparations for years. While we work with many eCommerce IT organizations, Best Buy is notably one of the best - they are forward thinking and innovative, technically savvy about performance and scalability, operationally excellent with extensive monitoring, and have an excellent partnership with their business team. In today's blog, I sat down with Andrew Tsai, the Akamai Engagement
Is Cyber Monday in the UK a Big Deal?
Monday marked Cyber Monday in the UK; a day projected to be the largest online shopping day pre-Christmas, and second only to Boxing Day in all of 2012. Visa projected up to 6.8 million transactions on retail sites yesterday, spending up to 465 million GBP. That figure puts online sales up 21 per cent on the equivalent day last year. Experian projected the UK will make 115 million visits to
What's that Spike? How the Best Retailers Load Test ...
Now that Cyber Monday has passed, we've left the most daunting of the 2012 traffic peaks behind us. US retailers were largely stable and available this year, with few catastrophic site failures. In general, retailers are much more mature with their readiness planning, starting earlier, and conducting load tests and simulations right before peak. For those of you tracking our Net Retail Traffic Index this past weekend, you may have
Cyber Monday Breaks New Traffic Records
Before we call it a night after a long but exciting day watching the Retail Net Usage Index, I owe you the final details. Cyber Monday traffic first began to climb early this morning, at 6:00 AM ET, and steadily grew to an early record peak at 11:00 AM. Traffic held steady at these levels until about 2:00 PM - a much stronger midday than in previous years. Then shoppers turned
Cyber Monday Set to Be Biggest Test Yet
While Cyber Monday typically drives the most revenue during the holiday weekend, in 2011 it fell short in driving either the most traffic, or the highest traffic peaks. Thanksgiving and Black Friday took those honors. This is somewhat expected; Black Friday and Thanksgiving are historically marketed as offline shopping days and therefore traffic on those days is in some part an indicator of offline purchase research. However Cyber Monday is
Huge Traffic Volumes on Black Friday
It was a strong Black Friday online by all accounts. IBM is reporting that sales on the day grew nearly 20% over last year. Black Friday also drove huge volumes of traffic, averaging over 6.3 million page views from 10AM Eastern through to the end of the night. As expected, peak traffic levels hit at approximately 11am ET, but there was no lull in the high volumes of traffic
Strong Start to Black Friday
In years past, Black Friday is the only day to reach its peak early in the day, with all other days peaking at 9 or 10:00 PM in the evening. Last year on Black Friday we reached peak by 11:00 AM ET, and in 2010 we hit peak by 1:00 PM ET. As I mentioned in the previous post, Black Friday may drive higher volumes all day but its peak
Another Hockey Stick Thanksgiving
Last year Thanksgiving Day was our biggest traffic growth day, growing 70% over the year prior, and driving our highest peak traffic of the Holiday weekend - beating out even CyberMonday - at 9:00 PM Eastern. With the early doorbusters once again causing controversy, we all expected another breakout year for shopping on Thanksgiving Day. By all accounts, Thanksgiving was a blow out traffic day. With an
The Proven Holiday Readiness Game Plan: An Interview ...
On this very calm Thanksgiving Eve, it's a perfect time to share with you all a "behind the scenes" look at how Akamai's commerce experts are engaging with retailers in preparation for this weekend. As Akamai is working with 96 of the IR100, we have broad visibility into holiday readiness preparations and what retailers are really expecting this season. To get a sense of what's to come this weekend, who