02 Jul
The holiday season might still be months away but eCommerce businesses around the world are already preparing their infrastructure for the annual influx of traffic as they launch their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
In our infographic we give you an overview of what happened on Black Friday 2019 and discuss what’s hiding behind the surges in customer traffic heading to your website.
Black Friday 2019: The results
Bargain hunters head online in their thousands on Black Friday. In 2019, shoppers in the US spent a total of $7.4bn at an average of $168 per order, that’s a 5.9% increase on Black Friday 2018.
The UK also saw similarly astronomical numbers with total transactions up 7.2% year-on-year, from £1.4bn to an estimated £1.6bn.
Retailers must be able to support the influx in website traffic to ensure they get a slice of this consumer spending.
What did Black Friday 2019 traffic look like?
However, it’s not just large amounts of legitimate traffic that can slow down your website. Cyber-attackers use automated bots to target eCommerce websites with excessive traffic and brute force attacks that take sites down, and often drive the user to a competitor.
In 2019, 38.6% of Black Friday traffic consisted of bad bots and 56% of bad bots on eCommerce sites were fourth generation bots; these bots can mimic human behaviour, making them exceedingly difficult to detect.
Top Black Friday bot attacks
The sophistication of bad bots is increasing across industries, more specifically within eCommerce.
On Black Friday 2019, nearly two-thirds of total website traffic was bots.
The most common bot attacks around this period are:
Are you prepared for Black Friday 2020?
On average, TrafficDefender customers experience between 10x and 40x times higher traffic rates on Black Friday compared to other sales day. Every retailers’ systems have a finite number of customers they can handle and are subject to third parties’ limitations, known and unknown bottlenecks. Even those able to use auto-scaling elastic resources often find they are unable to react quickly enough to deal with sharp and sudden spikes.
A virtual waiting room (VWR) is layer designed specifically to protect website infrastructure from being overloaded by spikes in traffic. With a VWR in place, websites are fully protected from any large spikes in traffic, services remain available to customers, those in a queue are kept informed of what is happening and every customer will receive the best possible experience onto the website.
Download the Black Friday 2020 guide and find out how TrafficDefender can keep your business online during the busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday period.
