Reliable IT Vital for Online Retailers at Christmas

Dec 4, 2013: Australia’s leading online experience retailer RedBalloon.com.au warns Christmas is make or break for the bottom line, and IT has a vital role to play in ensuring online retailers make the most of this peak spending period.

With online shopping more popular than ever, and most retailers experiencing their most profitable period in December, online retailers simply cannot afford for their sites to go down, or to deliver a poor customer experience.

Christmas Eve 2012 saw RedBalloon experience their first $1 million day, with a transaction being made on the site every 3.3 seconds. And according to a 2011 survey, 36 per cent of people are now conducting the majority of their Christmas shopping online – up from only two per cent five years earlier.*

RedBalloon Chief Technology Officer Simon Farrell, who joined the business in August, says with so many customers going online, delivering an uninterrupted service is paramount – both to secure maximum sales at Christmas and to deliver a great brand experience that will pay dividends into the New Year.

“12 years in, RedBalloon is still growing rapidly. We saw transactional growth of 40 per cent last financial year and more than one million customers visiting the RedBalloon desktop and mobile sites in December 2012 alone – almost double the same time in 2010. Our technology must grow with us,” Mr Farrell said.

“Thanks to solid groundwork over the last 18 months, including transitioning to the Amazon Web Services Cloud in 2012, we have greater redundancy and scalability than ever, and our level of Christmas readiness has never been better.”

Christmas has always been the biggest time of year for RedBalloon, but they have not always been as prepared as they are now.

In 2008 their IT team had to restart the website servers every hour – meaning a developer had to be on call and monitoring the site 24/7. The team worked in shifts babysitting the site, day and night. Then in 2009, RedBalloon’s hosting provider upgraded their database memory, but neglected to allocate memory to the SQL server. This meant even though the memory was sufficient, the database was only accessing a third of it and was failing every hour.

“Because we see almost 20 per cent of our traffic during December alone, we simply cannot afford – financially or from a customer happiness perspective – to have technology issues at this time of year, and nor can any other retailer.”

It’s not too late! Here are five simple things online retailers can still do to maximise Christmas sales:

1. Load Test. Get prepared for the spike in traffic by testing and ensuring your site can handle the load.

2. Calculate your maximum expected traffic. Then double it.

3. Run your team through your Disaster Recovery Program. This needs to be fresh in everyone’s mind.

4. Expect the worst and prepare for it. Thinking “That will never happen to us” is not a strategy.

5. Prepare your third parties. Communicate with them and make sure they too can take the load of Christmas.

Sydney-based RedBalloon was founded in 2001 and has grown into a $50 million business in 12 years. The business employs 70 people, has been ranked in BRW Magazine’s Best Places to Work five years consecutively and was named a Deloitte Technology Fast 50 company six times since 2006.

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For more information: Lauren Ashton, RedBalloon PR Manager – lauren@redballoon.com.au / 0404 136 675