Preparing for D11: eCommerce considerations for mega shopping events
What started as a celebration of bachelors or singles in China, popularly known as Singles’ day or Double 11, is now a yearly event in the e-commerce industry that isn’t just eagerly awaited but celebrated. While consumers start their preparations weeks ahead as they work on their wish lists, on the engineering side, concentrated efforts start months in advance to ensure that all units of an organization’s ecommerce stream are well equipped to handle the sheer volume of purchases that will be made. Typically, a significant chunk of annual ecommerce revenue is generated during mega shopping events such as these. Given its scale, it is hardly surprising to see the amount of effort that goes into ensuring that the event sees unprecedented success. Ensuring a seamless shopping experience during highly anticipated events such as D11 is extremely important to build a positive brand value in the eyes of consumers.
On the technological front, there are several pillars that need to be considered and aligned. Ensuring stability, availability and resilience of systems is crucial. However, it is one part of the story. Seamless integration of various systems is another important consideration. For example, in China, ecommerce players collaborate with multiple channels to offer customers with varied options to make purchases. Channels like TMALL, JD, WeChat often become auxiliary mediums through which purchase volumes are directed. These channels also need to harmoniously marry into the entire eco-system.
A delightful shopping experience doesn’t end at browsing catalogues and making purchases. Timely fulfillment of these orders is also vital to consumer experience and brand perception. When it comes to downstream processing of the orders Order Management Systems (OMS) need to integrate and interface with several SAP systems for critical activities like inventory updates, intercompany billing, retail inventory and financial reconciliation, sales posting and inventory processing. In a country like China, many warehouses and stores are integrated with sales channels (online, physical and omni) for round the clock fulfilment.
A D11 campaign, normally commences mid-October, peaks during 11/11 and culminates a week later. As a general principal, seasonal preparations should begin as early as July with a thorough assessment of anticipated traffic growth by taking into consideration inputs from local business units and marketing divisions. This should then be followed by load testing aligned with major scheduled changes. Once the current capacity has been accurately realized and the gaps have been identified, Infrastructure and Application changes for stability, scalability and capacity management must be identified, prioritized and executed.
As part of the preparations, it is essential to keep an eye on the performance throughout the event. To bring in this level of observability to life, there is a need to work closely with digital teams to create an end-to-end holiday readiness dashboard. This is a useful tool for the teams to collaborate and communicate major issues and showstoppers as teams prepare to tackle this day, head-on. It enables the teams to monitor where the organization is and then collectively decide what needs to be done to get to the end goal. To take the preparations a notch higher, there is a need to work intensively on site reliability to avoid any failures during the event. There must be rigorous testing for months where the systems and process flows are tested for any hiccups with the help of SRE and observability tools.
Catering to these complexities, the engineering work that goes behind an event like D11 is not without its fair share of challenges. It requires meticulous work, an elaborate plan and a well-thought-out checklist that needs to be followed to the dot. Here are a few examples of the kind of challenges any ecommerce giant may face during the event, along with steps to resolve the same.
There may be timeouts faced with instances like the preship interface while the event is live. The best way to tackle this is to use the alerting systems we have prepared for just such a scenario to notify the respective on-call teams who can do a root-cause analysis and immediately fix these issues with their expertise.
Special orders like gift with purchase might create blocking sessions thereby interfering with the scheduling of other orders. The responsible teams can resolve this issue by isolating such orders by enforcing a hold so that regular orders go through scheduling seamlessly. Once these orders are all scheduled, GWP orders may be processed with a smaller subset of recourses.
It is important to realize the complexity of these preparatory activities because D11 is a major event in China and while these preparations can be replicated on a global scale for the holiday season, organizations must be mindful of regulatory restrictions in different countries. For example, it is a regulatory requirement to freeze the inventory beforehand for D11 in China. Additionally, any business requirements must be thoroughly regulated to make sure the company abides by such legal regulations.
These are the cheat codes for organizations to ace holiday events and come out the other side with flying colors. Being prepared for the worst-case scenarios with the help of rigorous testing of platforms and systems, along with keeping a constant eye on the ongoing performance measures is the only way to best capitalize on such holiday events in the e-commerce industry.
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