Load testing, early risk analysis, and incident logging: how VTEX is preparing for Black Friday

NEW YORK, November 18, 2021 — VTEX, the enterprise digital commerce platform for premier brands and retailers, leader in accelerating the digital commerce transformation in Latin America and now expanding globally, follows a detailed schedule of actions to prepare for Black Friday, which will take place on November 26 in most of the 32 countries serviced by the company. Underway since August, the planning, which includes load testing, early risk analysis, and incident protocol, involves a multidisciplinary technology team composed of professionals dedicated to areas such as infrastructure, security, privacy, site reliability engineering (SRE), development, and product applications.

“The biggest challenge in preparing for Black Friday is the balance between introducing new features and platform stability to ensure that everything works fully when the demand for elastic increase of capacity comes. To achieve this, we perform a thorough risk analysis and prioritization, as well as load testing the system by estimating the growth in access and transaction volume on this day. For example, engineers from the SRE and development teams together with the product application teams establish global performance criteria, aiming to optimize VTEX’s response time as much as possible, taking into account the many possible scenarios analyzed,” explains Gustavo Franco, Director of Engineering and Infrastructure at VTEX.

To ensure security and performance throughout Black Friday for the more than 2,500 online stores it serves around the world, VTEX also has an incident management protocol specifically developed for this day. “Our protocol is based on our own constant monitoring over the platform, direct contact with clients, exclusively dedicated on-call teams, and primary and secondary communication channels so that we can immediately identify, mitigate, and eliminate any type of incident,” says Gustavo Franco.

In addition to the well-known growth opportunity for online stores, Black Friday also represents the possibility of accelerating knowledge, skills, and expertise about the digital commerce ecosystem for everyone involved.

“The Black Friday environment enables the teams to gain an understanding of the entire VTEX platform operation in a very accelerated way, besides allowing the immediate resolution of incidents, a much bigger challenge than, for example, working with features whose implementation has been planned ahead in the medium and long term. This experience is fundamental to help professionals such as software engineers to plan, architect, and implement projects,” adds Gustavo Franco.

The learning process is accelerated on a large scale, too, by VTEX’s direct participation in Black Fridays and similar events around the world. In 2020, the company recorded, during Black Week (or Black Friday week), an increase of approximately 85% in volume of access to online stores that use its platform. Some VTEX clients report an expected increase of up to 300% in the number of orders compared to their average daily sales.

Tips for stores to maintain website performance during Black Friday

To ensure the best possible shopping experience for consumers during Black Friday, a time when there is a significant flow increase in digital commerce stores, as well as other times of the year, VTEX advises merchants to adopt some measures to optimize the site, such as:

• Make sure visitors see Black Friday promotions as soon as they enter the page.
• Clearly signal the promotions for that day, showing exactly what is offered, such as discount percentage and special shipping conditions.
• Create Black Friday special pages well in advance of the promotion so that search engines have time to find and index them.
• Communicate in advance the Black Friday deals that will be available, using mechanisms such as countdowns on the homepage.
• Take into account consumer experience on mobile devices since a significant portion of Black Friday purchases are made on smartphones or tablets.

About VTEX

VTEX (NYSE: VTEX) provides a software-as-a-service digital commerce platform for enterprise brands and retailers. Our platform enables our customers to execute their commerce strategy, including building online stores, integrating and managing orders across channels, and creating marketplaces to sell products from third-party vendors. Founded in Brazil, we have been a leader in accelerating the digital commerce transformation in Latin America and are expanding globally. Our platform is engineered to enterprise-level standards and features. We are trusted by more than 2,000 customers with over 2,500 active online stores across 32 countries, who rely on VTEX to connect with their consumers in a meaningful way*.

*Figures as of FY ended on Dec. 31st, 2020

Press Contacts

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