Black Friday is one of the UK’s biggest weekends for the retail industry – with total spend in 2024 forecasted at £9.15bn. As positive as this may seem, online shopping now being heavily favoured over in-person shopping means that retailers’ systems face an overwhelming amount of pressure. If they don’t have the right systems in place, Black Friday can end up being the opposite of successful for even the biggest UK retailers – with an increased threat of outages and cyber-attacks.
To prepare for Black Friday, retailers must strengthen their infrastructure and leverage AI-driven observability platforms for proactive monitoring, real-time insights, inventory management, and automated issue resolution. Reducing supply chain complexity and optimising performance across all channels will be key.
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Retailers that use AI-driven platforms and logistics will gain significant performance benefits, ensuring a successful Black Friday. Modern retail operations require more than basic monitoring. By introducing an AI-powered observability platform into systems, retailers can proactively optimise their operation time, maintaining their peak performance. Unified observability combining infrastructure monitoring with application performance monitoring, log management and digital experience monitoring means that retailers can stay on top of demand, and how their systems are coping at busy times.
Online success means overall success
With online sales taking the lead in UK Black Friday sales, a retailer’s online performance is pivotal to its success. If there is any downtime at all on their eCommerce websites, it can result in long queues, crashes, and resultantly a reduction of sales. Consumers prefer efficiency and a quick buying experience, so retailers need to ensure they can provide this.
Retailers need to have an advanced AI observability platform for monitoring of all system components in place, from load times to third-party operations such as payment processors or shipping services. By using real-time analytics, retailers can identify performance bottlenecks and provide actionable insights for making quick and efficient decisions. By enabling proactive adjustments, retailers can maintain a high performance, which results in customer satisfaction.
Retailers should also be focusing on harnessing AI operations for early warning detection to make sure Black Friday runs smoothly. AI operations enable businesses to see any problems, such as slow loading times and challenging check out services, before they happen and understand the source of these problems. AI proactively alerts the business’ network and IT operations teams way before the issue becomes widespread, meaning they can act on it before it causes problems for customers and results in an unsuccessful Black Friday.
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By GlobalDataSmart forecasting for dynamic load management
Resource management is extremely unpredictable on big sales events such as Black Friday, so retailers must make sure they have accurate forecasting to meet demands. Over-selling products will result in mass customer dissatisfaction, complaints and backlash. To ensure they optimise inventory appropriately, retailers should be using AI-driven platforms which use high-resolution data from past events to forecast data for upcoming events.
Advanced observability platforms have the capabilities to analyse variables, including buying patterns, regional demand shifts, consumer browsing behaviour and real-time sales, as well as historical trends across the network and previous system performance. Through integrating these data points, in the run up to Black Friday, retailers will have a comprehensive view of potential demand fluctuations. These insights guarantee efficient scaling of infrastructure, enhanced resource allocation, and uninterrupted performance.
Staying ahead of the traffic
Black Friday is truly retailers’ time to shine. If they prove they can stay ahead of the rush and exceed customer expectations, they will in turn maximise their sales and build customer loyalty. However, they need to make sure their IT can withstand the pressure to do this. By implementing comprehensive AI observability which offers predictive analytics, provides real-time visibility and system optimisation, retailers can deliver a seamless customer experience, minimise supply chain complexity and avoid infrastructure overwhelm.
Anticipating demand and swiftly addressing challenges during busy periods is key to success and AI-powered observability enables retailers to stay ahead by proactively monitoring IT infrastructure. If retailers come prepared to high-stake shopping periods with intelligent IT infrastructure monitoring and observability, they can avoid common technological mishaps, such as outages. By ensuring customers are having a seamless and positive experience, they will build on their relationship further, resulting in continued loyalty post-sale season
