Black Friday & E-commerce: Scaling Is the Difference Between Selling and Crashing
Black Friday is no longer merely a day of discounts; it has evolved into a global event that tests the limits of every digital business. That tests the limits of every digital business, where each second, click or technical glitch can mean thousands in revenue gained or lost.
In 2024, online sales during the Black Friday weekend surpassed $70 billion, growing by approximately 17 percent year over year. Behind those numbers lies a growing challenge: can your platform handle the demand?
Traffic explodes and so does the risk
Many e-commerce sites experience traffic spikes between 3x and 8x their normal levels during Black Friday. This does not just test your infrastructure. It pressures your login flows, APIs, search functions and especially checkout performance.
Over 70 percent of all purchases now happen on mobile devices. Even a one-second delay can drop conversion rates dramatically. A two-second increase in load time may reduce conversions by up to seven percent.
Downtime is even more critical. Just one hour offline can cost a large retailer millions. The reputational damage may linger long after the campaign period ends.
Performance is no longer invisible
During Black Friday, performance becomes part of the product. A slow page creates friction, hesitation and cart abandonment. A fast, seamless experience builds trust and drives revenue.
According to Bloomreach, 79 percent of shoppers avoid brands after a poor technical experience during Black Friday. That impact goes well beyond a single weekend.
What scalable infrastructure actually looks like
Modern platforms prepare with server-side rendering (SSR), global CDNs and microservices that can scale independently. Catalog, search, cart and checkout should not rely on shared resources. Database performance matters too, with read replicas and failover capabilities ensuring availability under load.
Deployment pipelines should support blue-green or canary releases. Observability tools must be in place for real-time issue detection. These components are essential if you expect five times more traffic and want one hundred percent of it to convert.
Essential technical KPIs
- API response time: below 200 milliseconds
- Mobile checkout time: under 1.5 seconds
- Uptime: above 99.99 percent
- Rollback time: under 60 seconds
- 5xx error rate during peak: below 0.1 percent
- Mobile conversion rate: two to three percentage points above average
Real examples of tech making the difference
A European fashion brand reduced checkout latency from 3.2 seconds to 1.1 seconds by isolating the checkout service and using distributed caching. The result was a 23 percent increase in conversions year over year.
An electronics marketplace implemented a global CDN, optimized catalog delivery and handled seven times more traffic with zero downtime and consistent sub-1.2 second load times.
A startup relying on an untested third-party payment API lost nearly 400 active carts in under an hour when the integration failed under pressure. Marketing spend was wasted and trust was damaged.
Real-world scale: the GoPuff architecture transformation
GoPuff, one of the leading instant commerce platforms in the US and Europe, needed to ensure its infrastructure could handle extreme peaks in traffic without breaking the customer experience, especially during moments like Black Friday or product launch surges.
Working closely with their engineering team, Glazed re-architected core parts of the platform to be modular, cloud-native and resilient. This involved redesigning the frontend with a scalable React architecture, decoupling business-critical services into independent APIs, and implementing advanced observability with real-time alerts and fallback scenarios.
The result was a system capable of absorbing usage spikes with no performance loss, enabling GoPuff to scale across new markets while maintaining its promise of speed, reliability and frictionless checkout, even when pressure was at its highest.
Preparation is not a luxury
Black Friday engineering starts weeks in advance. Load testing should simulate five to ten times the normal peak. Resilience testing must cover failure scenarios across APIs, databases and third-party services.
It is best practice to freeze code deployments two to three weeks before the event. Teams must know who is responsible for incident response, how to perform safe rollbacks and how to communicate clearly during outages.
The customer experience is built on code
It does not matter how good your marketing is if the platform cannot keep up. Emails, push notifications and countdown timers are worthless if the site lags, crashes or stalls at checkout.
Performance is brand. On Black Friday, engineering is part of the customer promise.
Conclusion: scale is the real strategy
Black Friday 2025 will bring more users, higher expectations, and greater technical pressure. The most successful brands will not be the ones with the biggest discounts. They will be the ones with the strongest digital foundations.
The difference between converting and crashing is not marketing. It is engineering.
How Glazed can help
Glazed Solutions has helped high-traffic platforms across fashion, marketplaces and digital commerce prepare for high-demand events like Black Friday. From microservice refactoring and checkout optimization to API performance and real-time observability, our engineering teams know how to deliver stability at scale.
If you are planning for traffic spikes and want to be ready when it matters most, we can help you build the performance foundation your business deserves.
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