Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become the ultimate annual events for both consumers, as well as retailers, who plan for these well ahead of time to ensure it all runs smoothly.
Grown in popularity over the years, and even more so since the pandemic, bank reports suggested that this year Black Friday transactions were up a staggering 141% compared to a normal trading day. NatWest and Nationwide both reported over 4m transactions by lunchtime on Black Friday, while Barclaycard also recorded 21.4% more purchases compared to 2020.
Black Friday transactions were up a staggering 141% compared to a normal trading day
Given the significance of these events particularly for the retailers who are trying to recoup post pandemic, there is a distinct pressure for those retailers that will be inundated with soaring eCommerce volumes and the slightest idea of a technical glitch is any retailer’s nightmare. The robustness of your payments gateway and your website/mobile app checkout to accommodate a sheer volume of traffic are probably the most crucial functions when running a smooth and successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The truth is that outages and downtime can still happen however well-prepared you may be and however advanced you think the technology you are using is.
We all remember what occurred with Macy’s a few years ago, when they encountered nationwide problems processing payments during the busiest shopping day of the year. Not only did the retailer lose out on thousands in sales but also left a lot of its customers, (including loyal customers) frustrated and unimpressed, which was somewhat damaging and embarrassing for the brand. No business, particularly eCommerce platforms and merchants, that are heavily reliant on online transactions like to think about the implications of a payment gateway outage can have on them and hope that it won’t happen to them, but it is this kind of mindset that can be costly to your business.
Merchants aside, even digital platforms have issues. This year, we saw Revolut battling major Black Friday problems as customers were unable to use their accounts on their mobiles to sign in or make card payments, with at least six of its services being affected by the outage.
So what do merchants do if this was happening with their primary payments gateway? It’s tough when you rely on payments but can’t take one.
Paydock’s fail-proof feature is a great example of how merchants can overcome this issue. Our technology is built in with a feature that mitigates downtime risk by enabling merchants to fail-over to an alternative gateway when their primary gateway is down. By ensuring their customer’s sensitive payment data is securely stored in our vault, merchants can operate with peace of mind that their business is open for business even when their service providers experience downtime.
For subscription-based businesses, the impact of a payment gateway outage extends beyond just Black Friday and Cyber Monday as it has multiple, negative implications on their ability to renew subscriptions and sign up new subscribers, affecting their bottom line even more significantly. So how can subscription businesses protect from these outages? Should they be thinking beyond just ensuring that their tech, website and mobile apps are intact? The tricky part is that every business interprets “robust payments infrastructure” in a different way. But the trick is to seek for an infrastructure that is more holistic and maximises your chances of succeeding with minimum effort or cost.
Subscription businesses can benefit from Paydock’s sophisticated recurring engine, this provides autonomous recurring payments across your Paydock-managed payment gateway infrastructure. Among a myriad of innovative features, our engine offers a configurable retry capability, which means that you are in total control of “what happens and how” when a payment fails, how many times you retry, how long between retries, and what happens then.
The more in control you have, the less there is a chance of your business having to bear the cost of any hiccups.
In other words, the more in control you have, the less there is a chance of your business having to bear the cost of any hiccups. Look for an infrastructure that can effortlessly orchestrate all of your payments requirements and processes.
Our clients have been able to plug in hundreds of instances of gateways globally and remain in total control, expand effortlessly into new geographies, currencies, and regions. With easy access to your favourite payment gateways and acceptance services already connected, you can use the gateways that best suit your business needs depending on the phase of business you’re in. Best-of-breed always trumps single-vendor, and we’re here to have your back.
Without a highly scalable, resilient payments infrastructure in place, there is no guarantee your business will survive the pressure of soaring volumes on Black Friday or any other day of the year for that matter. Payments orchestration with Paydock lifts that burden for you and ensures that you won’t be left in the dark for your customers.
Be prepared for next time.
Want to be prepared for the next big retail event? Get in touch with one of our friendly experts today at [email protected]
