Singles’ Day has ballooned quickly to become one of the biggest shopping festivals in Asia. All E-commerce platforms from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are already actively promoting and stocking up their warehouses for the event. This leads us to one question, are their websites truly ready for the exploding data traffic during the festival? E-commerce platforms can potentially damage their customer satisfaction rates and faith towards the suppliers if the websites crash in the checkout process. This might tear up their corporate reputation. The construction of “Modernized IT Architecture” and “Data Digital Transformation” shall be the key to how E-commerce companies and retailers can stay ahead of the game.
The origins of the Singles’ Day Shopping Festival dates back to November 11, 2009. Taobao China from Alibaba invented this promotion: The 11.11 Global Shopping Festival. In the past decade, E-commerce platforms and retailers have hopped on this train, joining this battle. Companies even came up with another extension of the festival known as the “Double 12”. A series of annual shopping festival is no doubt a great challenge to the websites handling massive data traffic, cash flow and data storage.
A Great Challenge to E-commerce Companies and Retailers: Exploding Data Traffic and Technical Debt
Traditional on-perm environments lack flexibility and scalability. The exploding data traffic and server load from the shopping festivals can be seen as a naturally generated super DDoS. The term Technical Debt refers to the “messy coding language” of a system due to budget controls and required speedy development process in the initial launching stage. The incompatibility of new systems and legacy operating environments is also a major issue. This leads to system malfunctions that are often overlooked, creating more needed manpower, time and costs into the maintenance process when the product and service goes online.
According to reports, Alibaba’s Southeast Asian E-commerce Company, Lazada, hit an astounding 20 million visits on its platform on Singles‘ day last year, which was a new record high for the site. The company’s service areas include countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The Hong Kong Television Network Ltd. owned HKTVmall also took part in last year’s Singles’ Day Promotion. The daily order volume increased over 110% compared to average sales numbers and the page views for the site also went up to 1.6 million per day. Thus, the prevention of system overloading and the reduced performance of websites caused by the exploding data traffic is a crucial factor for the E-commerce companies that wish to boost their sales.