Skip to content
Logo-black
  • Native Commerce Core™
    • IDC-marketscape-q4-2024-resources-hub-cover-562x562@2x

      Constructor is a leader in the IDC marketscape

      Constructor is a Leader in the IDC MarketScape on Worldwide Knowledge Discovery Software for External-Facing Use Cases, 2024.

        • Search & Autosuggest

          Hyper-personalized ecommerce search driven by AI and real-time shopper behavior.

        • Browse

          Personalize your ecommerce category pages for maximum conversions.

        • Recommendations

          Drive upsells and increase RPV with hyper-personalized product recommendations.

        • Collections

          Dynamic, personalized ecommerce collection pages that learn from every search, click, and purchase.

        • Quizzes

          Create smart product recommendation quizzes that drive shopper engagement.

        • Merchant Controls & Intelligence

          Get the ecommerce merchandising controls and insights you need to make high-impact changes that drive revenue.

        • Attribute Enrichment

          Automatically enrich product attributes and categories to give shoppers the best possible experience.

        • AI Shopping Assistant

          Help your online customers discover great products faster.

        • Retail Media

          Constructor Sponsored Listings complement (instead of compete with) your organic results.

        • Cross-Channel & Offsite Discovery

          Create and launch personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns across digital channels.

        • B2B Use-Cases

          Product discovery technology that’s purpose-built to handle the complex needs of B2B ecommerce.

  • Customers
    • Beyond Relevance Featured

      Beyond Relevance Report

      The Data-Backed Case for Attractiveness as the New Standard for Ecommerce Search Performance.

        • Upcoming Events

          Visit us in person at ecommerce industry events.

        • Reports & Guides

          New research, guidance, and insights for the future of retail.

        • Webinars

          Educational webinars, conversations with Constructor partners, and more.

        • Blog

          The latest ideas and news from the frontier of commerce search and discovery.

        • Split/Test Digest

          The most interesting learnings from A/B testing at Constructor.

        • News

          Read Constructor's latest news coverage and press announcements.

        • Documentation

          Learn about the components of Constructor's advanced, AI-powered product discovery suite.

        • About Us

          With AI in our DNA and by keeping ecommerce as our core focus, we’ve built the best product search and discovery solution specifically for the unique needs of retailers.

        • Partners

          Constructor partners with the world’s top retail consultants, systems integrators, and technology platforms.

        • Careers

          Constructor is building the next generation of search solutions.

Login
Book a Demo
  • Native Commerce Core™
    • IDC-marketscape-q4-2024-resources-hub-cover-562x562@2x

      Constructor is a leader in the IDC marketscape

      Constructor is a Leader in the IDC MarketScape on Worldwide Knowledge Discovery Software for External-Facing Use Cases, 2024.

        • Search & Autosuggest

          Hyper-personalized ecommerce search driven by AI and real-time shopper behavior.

        • Browse

          Personalize your ecommerce category pages for maximum conversions.

        • Recommendations

          Drive upsells and increase RPV with hyper-personalized product recommendations.

        • Collections

          Dynamic, personalized ecommerce collection pages that learn from every search, click, and purchase.

        • Quizzes

          Create smart product recommendation quizzes that drive shopper engagement.

        • Merchant Controls & Intelligence

          Get the ecommerce merchandising controls and insights you need to make high-impact changes that drive revenue.

        • Attribute Enrichment

          Automatically enrich product attributes and categories to give shoppers the best possible experience.

        • AI Shopping Assistant

          Help your online customers discover great products faster.

        • Retail Media

          Constructor Sponsored Listings complement (instead of compete with) your organic results.

        • Cross-Channel & Offsite Discovery

          Create and launch personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns across digital channels.

        • B2B Use-Cases

          Product discovery technology that’s purpose-built to handle the complex needs of B2B ecommerce.

  • Customers
    • Beyond Relevance Featured

      Beyond Relevance Report

      The Data-Backed Case for Attractiveness as the New Standard for Ecommerce Search Performance.

        • Upcoming Events

          Visit us in person at ecommerce industry events.

        • Reports & Guides

          New research, guidance, and insights for the future of retail.

        • Webinars

          Educational webinars, conversations with Constructor partners, and more.

        • Blog

          The latest ideas and news from the frontier of commerce search and discovery.

        • Split/Test Digest

          The most interesting learnings from A/B testing at Constructor.

        • News

          Read Constructor's latest news coverage and press announcements.

        • Documentation

          Learn about the components of Constructor's advanced, AI-powered product discovery suite.

        • About Us

          With AI in our DNA and by keeping ecommerce as our core focus, we’ve built the best product search and discovery solution specifically for the unique needs of retailers.

        • Partners

          Constructor partners with the world’s top retail consultants, systems integrators, and technology platforms.

        • Careers

          Constructor is building the next generation of search solutions.

Login
Book a Demo
Back to Blog

5 Ways Your Product Discovery Vendor Should Prepare You for the Holidays

Merchandising Product Discovery Ecommerce Technology
Posted on:
August 14, 2023
Author:
Constructor Team
product discovery vendor holiday preparations
Table of Contents:
product discovery vendor holiday preparations

Holiday shopping makes up a large chunk of yearly ecommerce sales, with over 20% of total retail sales happening over the holidays and peak demand period of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

And while a select few ecommerce website crashes from increased seasonal traffic turn out to be a blessing in disguise, the vast majority have cost retailers millions of dollars over the years. And the worst part? Many could have been prevented. 

This year, take your uptime and conversions seriously with help from a trusted product discovery vendor. Here’s how your vendor should help you prepare for the most important selling period of the year.    

How Your Product Discovery Vendor Should Prepare You for the Holidays 

product discovery vendor holiday preparations

True partners in product discovery understand that conversion optimization and product discovery benefits are only as good as your uptime and site performance. For this reason, they have a robust process of performance validation and monitoring in place months before the holiday season hits. 

Here are initiatives they can help you maneuver ahead of increased holiday traffic: 

1. Automate alerting

Automatic alerting should be set up year-round to help ecommerce teams navigate all periods of traffic surges — from the holidays to new product launches to overall business growth. 

This measure ensures teams are aware of incidents across important metrics within seconds. Some metrics to flag are: 

  • Queuing times. This is how long it takes to send, store, and receive messages between software components. The quicker the queuing time, the more quickly your customers will ultimately find their intended products.

  • Per-service latencies. This is the time lag between computing operations in your ecommerce tech stack. A high volume of traffic can increase the probability of issues, such as search performance degradation.  

  • Memory and CPU consumption. High resource consumption can lead to slow website performance and a worsened user experience, causing delays in page loading, product browsing, and checkout processes.  

For increased effectiveness, coordinate how your team will handle the alerts, including who’s accountable for which metric and appropriate response times. 

2. Scale out performance testing

Imagine a sudden increase of highway traffic by 80% — which happens to be the average percent increase in ecommerce traffic over the holidays. It’s only natural for there to be an increase in accidents, slowdowns, and other issues if proper preparations (i.e., road expansions) weren’t made ahead of time.

This is similar to the back-end product discovery experience. Just like a road supervisor would recommend opening up more lanes to facilitate the flow of more traffic, proactive product discovery vendors can help you anticipate periods of increased site traffic so you can make the necessary adjustments to your site ahead of time.

They’ll scale out testing to over 500% of current average daily traffic volume based on historical patterns to validate the continued performance of: 

  • Database connections 
  • Monitoring infrastructure
  • Networking infrastructure
  • Response latencies
  • Data ingestion SLA times

And the best product discovery vendors have infrastructure that automatically expands and contracts based on traffic volume year-round — without costing you extra. 

This means if your team forgets to tell your vendor about upcoming traffic increases, your system won’t be slowed or brought down. And forgetting to tell your vendor to scale back in doesn’t mean you’re stuck paying for additional capacity you don’t need after the higher traffic period is over. (Cheers to one less thing to keep track of!)  

 

3. Perform chaos and anti-fragility testing

But what happens if despite all the highway planning, a car does break down and clogs up traffic, or a bridge is out? What if someone drives down the wrong side of the road? 

With chaos and anti-fragility testing, these events are introduced artificially so solutions surface that ensure traffic continues moving (i.e., cars are re-routed to a different highway if a bridge is under construction). 

In product discovery, this translates to verifying that critical features — think search, browse, recommendations, collections request/response times, etc. — aren’t impacted. To prevent downtime, testing works to validate good outcomes in the event of: 

  • Disabled MySQL
  • Disabled index builders
  • Disabled personalization queues
  • Disabled supplemental ranking engines
  • Availability zone and data center failures

4. Perform special holiday on-call procedures

During the months leading up to the peak season, your vendor will help you confirm the following teams are coordinating closely:

  • Front-end and client teams
  • Data science and result quality teams
  • Core platform and response performance teams

Best practice is for the entire account and product team to monitor processes throughout the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, with elevated focus for other holiday periods as well, like the day after Christmas (Boxing Day).

In addition, your vendor should recommend you double on-call rotation and solidify fallbacks and clear contingency plans in the case of site crashes. (Remember to loop in key stakeholders to develop and test the plans before they’re needed!)

5. Code freeze during critical time periods 

Have your product discovery vendor freeze all deployments except for the most critical fixes from Black Friday through to Cyber Monday.

This ensures that the ecommerce site remains stable and minimizes the risk of performance issues or downtime while customers are shopping. Implementing a code freeze also allows developers to concentrate on monitoring and addressing any issues that may arise, rather than spending time on coding and implementing new changes.   

Just as is the case with the on-call procedures, best practice is to plan ahead, complete any necessary updates, and test them well in advance of the holiday rush. And during the code freeze, closely monitor site performance while keeping all relevant stakeholders informed. This allows for timely identification and resolution of any issues that may arise.

Other Ways You Can Prepare for Increased Holiday Traffic

how to prepare for holiday traffic

As your product discovery vendor is helping you manage back-end holiday preparations, your ecommerce team can advance on further adjustments to your platform: 

  • Get creative with your cart abandonment strategy. Use retargeting campaigns or abandoned cart emails infused with humor and discounts to address incomplete orders. (Check out how to reduce cart abandonment rates in the first place.)

  • Ramp up your marketing presence. Plan and schedule social media events, holiday promotions, and other festive initiatives at least one to two months in advance. For increased brand awareness, consider partnering with micro influencers with more engaged audiences.

  • Make product discovery easier for shoppers. This includes offering predictive text when searching, dynamically re-ordering category pages according to user behavior, and enriching attributes with ever-changing buyer trends, among other solutions.

  • Embrace omnichannel. Integrate online and offline data to provide a seamless, cohesive shopping experience for customers. This can mean allowing mobile shoppers to buy online pick up in store (BOPIS), and then retargeting them with relevant email campaigns.

See how else you can optimize your holiday sales strategy to streamline the purchasing process, increase buyer confidence, and hit key business goals during the busiest — and most lucrative — time of the year. 

Holiday Readiness Starts Today 

Delivering exceptional customer experiences — no matter the season — starts with taking uptime, performance, and service stability seriously. After all, the best conversion optimization and machine learning technologies are moot if you can’t deliver fast and stable service consistently.

That’s why you should partner with a product discovery vendor with strong site reliability practices and holiday-readiness procedures. 

Find out other criteria on which to judge your product discovery vendor in our RFP template.

What's next?

Uncover lost revenue opportunities with a complimentary Search Experience Audit.

According to the 2024 State of Ecommerce Search & Product Discovery Survey, nearly 70% of shoppers think the search function on retail websites needs an upgrade. Our team has run over 1000 A/B tests to identify easy-to-implement algorithmic and UX improvements that get results. Use their research to your advantage with a complimentary Search Experience Audit — no strings attached.

Request an Audit
  • Analyze your search results quality
  • Identify "no results" pages
  • Pinpoint irrelevant results for long-form queries
  • Uncover UX opportunities for Search, Autocomplete, and PLPs

According to the 2024 State of Ecommerce Search & Product Discovery Survey, nearly 70% of shoppers think the search function on retail websites needs an upgrade. Our team has run over 1000 A/B tests to identify easy-to-implement algorithmic and UX improvements that get results. Use their research to your advantage with a complimentary Search Experience Audit — no strings attached.

Request an Audit
  • MACH Certified
  • 21972-312_SOC_NonCPA-150x150
  • Cartification-mark_04-09-300x253-1-150x150
Constructor.io Logo
  • Technology
    • Native Commerce Core™
    • Request a Demo
    • The Proof Schedule®
  • Solutions
    • Search & Autosuggest
    • Browse
    • Recommendations
    • Collections
    • Quizzes
    • Merchant Controls & Intelligence
    • Attribute Enrichment
    • AI Shopping Assistant
    • B2B Solutions
  • Resources Hub
    • Events
    • Reports, Guides & Webinars
    • Blog
    • Experiments
    • News
    • Constructor vs Alternatives
    • Documentation
  • About
    • About Us
    • Partners
    • Security & Compliance
    • Careers
  • Technology
    • Native Commerce Core™
    • Request a Demo
    • The Proof Schedule®
  • Solutions
    • Search & Autosuggest
    • Browse
    • Recommendations
    • Collections
    • Quizzes
    • Merchant Controls & Intelligence
    • Attribute Enrichment
    • AI Shopping Assistant
    • B2B Solutions
  • Resources Hub
    • Events
    • Reports, Guides & Webinars
    • Blog
    • Experiments
    • News
    • Constructor vs Alternatives
    • Documentation
  • About
    • About Us
    • Partners
    • Security & Compliance
    • Careers
© 2025 Constructor All rights reserved
  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy