When we were redesigning our dashboards back in 2016, we paid special attention to our orders monitoring system. We wanted to make our main KPI as visually appealing as possible, as well as easily noticeable, even from across the office. Our design team did a good job, and the new dashboard quickly became a company favorite.
Meanwhile, our product kept evolving into an even more comprehensive and reliable solution to suit the complex commerce needs of enterprises worldwide. We’ve brought in a lot of clients from 28 different countries. Our YoY growth remained steady, at around 46%. But all those numbers meant only one thing: our responsibility was bigger and our platform had to be able to deal with an increasing number of users, traffic, and orders.
Building stability was embedded in our engineers’ routine since day one. Growing at a fast pace has only made it more decisive, and we can’t afford to overlook any potential issue. Since our platform is built on a multi-tenant architecture, continuously evolving our products with no downtime has always been critical.
That’s why we spent months improving our systems to make sure everything ran smoothly during one of the most critical days of a commerce operation. We were ready to handle millions of sessions and, why not, reach the 1 million orders milestone.
We were confident that Black Friday 2019 could be our best Black Friday to date. And that’s when we started to wonder: What would happen to our dashboard if we hit a seven-digit order number?
The only way to know something for sure is by testing it.
Since we had never seen so many orders in a single day, everybody started being curious about the dashboard’s behavior. Black Friday was approaching fast. Our clients’ sales were performing better day by day. It seemed we were getting close to seeing how much it could handle.
During the 24-hour event, our multi-tenant architecture and elastic infrastructure faced their biggest challenge to date. We dealt with 29,486,762 sessions, a single day all-time high for us
Our platform reached 1,033,625 orders, 53% more than last year’s Black Friday, and a peak of 987 per minute. Crossing that data with the number of sessions, we learned that our clients had an average conversion rate of 3.5%, three and a half times higher than on a regular day.
In addition, our dashboard handled the seven digits very well. Back in 2016, it was designed to be responsive, so it could easily adapt to our ever higher numbers. Just like our mindset.
We were thrilled by the results. Not because we had any doubt that we could get there. After all the hard work, what really amazed us was the fact that the 1 million orders dream wasn’t too far-fetched after all.
Want to take a more in-depth look at our 2019 Black Friday numbers? Check out the infographic.
