Black Friday is one of the most anticipated shopping dates of the year, now culminating in a multi-day event that is much longer than the single day that was originally part of the tradition. Consumers watch for deals and many retailers mark this as the start of the lucrative winter holiday shopping season. In recent years, in addition to sales at brick-and-mortar stores, there is also high traffic for e-commerce sales on Black Friday, as well as the internet-centric Cyber Monday.
This new shift is closely related to the advancement of technological transformation. Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality, and machine learning allow us to collect and analyze large amounts of data to improve our interactions with the products we want to buy.
Consumers are becoming more familiar with cutting edge ecommerce technologies and increasingly expect improvements from suppliers. For example, it's now possible to spend less time shopping online and make smarter purchases by selecting exactly the products we want—and, more importantly, those we need. Thanks to advancements like Amazon’s new AI Shopping Guides and other consumer-friendly sites, researching product types is easier than ever, providing shopping guidance and product recommendations based on the attributes and criteria most important to consumers.
Growth prospects for e-commerce
Adapting to this changing consumer behavior is essential for businesses to remain competitive. This means enabling customers to interact through multiple channels (omnichannel), whether through mobile applications, social networks, or marketplaces, and delivering a rich, differentiated, and seamless experience across all platforms.
In Latin America, the volume of e-commerce transactions was 509 billion in 2023 and is estimated to almost double by the end of 2026. According to Americas Market Intelligence, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Peru are the major markets contributing to this growth. If not properly managed, the massive increase in web traffic during a special event such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday can saturate servers, cause downtime, slow page load times, degrade user experience, and result in economic loss.
Optimize your critical infrastructure
Business continuity is a priority for enterprises. To avoid IT overload and reduce the possibility of downtime during peak traffic, it is essential to deploy critical digital infrastructure technologies that protect your data centers from power and cooling issues that can bring your business to a halt.
- Reduce latency: Edge computing enables data processing closer to the end user, decentralizing the workload from the central infrastructure, reducing latency and efficiently distributing traffic. Milliseconds of downtime can result in lost sales and customers so choose a mission-critical infrastructure with reliable power and cooling from the start. Choosing the right solutions could also reduce operational costs and increase resilience to high demand.
- Manage traffic spikes: The AI that provides rich user experiences and enables faster traffic also requires more power and generates more heat. To support the high-density servers with continuous power, you need high quality UPS to withstand power fluctuations and liquid cooling at the chip to remove excess heat.
- Implement an agile and effective system: An agile and available e-commerce system relies on power and cooling for effective operation. Remotely monitor and control your infrastructure and gauge service, maintenance, and technical staff to enable round the clock visibility and support. This strategy provides benefits such as anticipating problems, avoiding costly downtime, and keeping customers happy with the shopping experience.
At Vertiv, we offer a comprehensive portfolio of intelligent power, cooling, integrated infrastructure solutions, IT management, and services that address the visibility, monitoring, reliability, scalability, and IT management challenges operators face when they need to support high demand in e-commerce, including high impact dates such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday
To support retail and e-commerce companies in the data center design process, Vertiv created the Vertiv™ eTail Partner Program, designed to provide Vertiv Channel Partners with a strategy for implementing or improving data center or edge infrastructure for e-commerce systems. The strategy is based on the maturity of the virtual store, with advantages such as improving the performance of data centers in highly competitive environments.
