As the holiday season approaches, it's no surprise that you've likely come across numerous holiday readiness guides. After all, the holiday season is a significant time for businesses, with increased shopping activity and a significant portion of annual revenue at stake. Ecommerce companies, in particular, must be prepared for the holiday rush, making sure all aspects of the online shopping experience are running smoothly. To help you prepare your business for the holiday season and ensure a seamless experience for shoppers, we at Unbxd have focused on two often overlooked areas: site preparedness and infrastructure redundancy.

We understand that running a successful business requires juggling many tasks, and we want to help you scale without any setbacks, so you can focus on what matters most to your business.

Every year as part of Holiday readiness we assess our architecture for high availability and revisit our Standard Operating Processes based on past holiday traffic and current projections. We also look at recent incidents and remediation for these incidents. We conducted a holistic analysis to understand the impact of the holiday season. We expect a 20-30 percent increase in traffic based on customer profile and traffic projections.” says Jayanthi, Head of Engineering at Unbxd.

We conducted a heuristic analysis to understand the impact of the holiday season. We saw that there would be almost a 100% jump in QPS (Queries per Second), an 80% uptick in the amount of data being indexed and 87% more backend queries being processed. We thought it to be important to communicate the steps we were taking to cater to the business needs of our customers.

We showed our customers how our infrastructure currently operates and how it will behave and act as the peak traffic goes on to increase during the holiday season. We also showed them how increased caching capacity will solve downstream services and middleware timeouts. We understand that unplanned downtimes can happen anytime and we ensure that we are always prepared for that. To ensure that the system can handle the increased traffic and search queries during the holiday season, we have increased the capacity at the Proxy, search orchestration, and edge layers. (as seen in the image)

The layered architecture for site search

We also built an Unbxd Status page that gives our customers visibility into ongoing and previous incidents. Nothing can be more satiating for the customers than letting them know that we are working to fix their issues.

Amidst all the holiday craziness, we want the site search and performance to be the least of the concerns for any ecommerce player. And we have worked hard in the last few months to ensure we have the infrastructure and a system that can cater to these exponential business needs and give our customers a feeling that they are in safe hands.

"We wanted to lay trust in our customers about our preparedness for the coming holiday season, and we wanted to demo this to them live. And I must say, when we demonstrated the platform stability with test use-cases, showcasing our in-depth infrastructure architecture, the auto-healing capability of our systems – our customers were nothing less than delighted", says Nishant Agrawal, Product Lead for Site Search at Unbxd.

As online retailers know, site search is a crucial component of the ecommerce experience for shoppers. If customers cannot find what they are looking for within 3 seconds, they will likely abandon the website. This can be a major problem for businesses that strive to offer their customers top-quality products and services but cannot effectively showcase those offerings due to technical issues such as slow page loading or a poorly designed search function. To address these challenges, we recently hosted a webinar demonstrating our commitment to providing our clients with a reliable and efficient ecommerce platform.

In addition to addressing technical concerns, we also understand the value of having a human point of contact available for our customers in times of need. Therefore, we concluded the webinar by providing our clients with a direct line of communication in case of any urgent issues or concerns that may arise during the busy holiday season.

Unbxd is dedicated to creating a robust, reliable, and resilient ecommerce ecosystem for our clients if you have experienced the negative consequences of a subpar site search or inadequate ecommerce infrastructure.

It may be time to consider switching to a solution that truly cares about its customers. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us and schedule a demo to learn more about how we can support your business.