Tales from the Backend: What a Perfect BFCM Looks Like

We’re excited to announce our performance metrics for this year’s holiday shopping weekend.

The number of orders synced through Celigo’s Integration Apps for the weekend of Nov 27 through Dec 1, 2020 more than doubled that of the weekend before. Additionally, this load is four times greater than the average for a typical weekend outside the holiday season. Despite this increase of over 100%, our platform handled the increased load flawlessly as if it were any other weekend.

Black Friday? Cyber Monday? No lag, no downtime, no problem.

Check out the actual performance chart:

How we did it

While we’re thrilled about this year’s outcome, our iPaaS is designed to handle upticks like this. Here’s why we can handle Black Friday through Cyber Monday without hiccups:

1. Our iPaaS, integrator.io, is designed as a “streaming platform” that can break down large data payloads into smaller pages of data. This means that we can make huge amounts of data travel seamlessly even to apps that can’t normally support large data payloads (read: Black Friday orders).
2. We’ve implemented protocols that essentially allow your applications to know whether the data they send will be processed by an integration flow. If not, they will be re-sent to try again.
3. We support a large number of configuration options to tune the performance of your integration flows. For example, you can set up your integration flows to only sync changed or updated data, rather than everything under the sun. To learn more about optimizations and best practices to prepare your integrations for the holidays, you might be interested in this blog series on Managing the Holiday Rush with Concurrencies.
4. integrator.io uses Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for queues and messaging and Confluent (Kafka) to stream process event data. Both are industry-leading solutions for scalability and reliability.
5. integrator.io has an uptime of 99.999% (and repeating) over the past three years, because we know our customers depend on us to run their essential business processes. Additionally, we never have scheduled downtime.

To learn more about our iPaaS’ core technical fundamentals, click here.

Supporting eCommerce merchants during the holiday rush

All this, of course, means that our eTail customers could depend on stable infrastructure when it matters most. Any hiccups would throw a massive wrench into what could be the most profitable weekend of the year. On top of creating order out of an otherwise chaotic weekend, but we can even help make fulfillments even more efficient during these peak shopping rushes. If you had trouble with order fulfillment this holiday season, an iPaaS is a worthy investment to ensure that your orders, inventory, product information, and any third party fulfillment services are updated as smoothly as possible.

Anecdotally, I made some purchases that I received zero updates on for a week. I’m hesitant to order from those stores in the future if I can’t be sure of when I would receive holiday gifts in the mail! Trust me when I say that customers can tell which merchants invested in their infrastructure and prepared properly, and which ones that did not. When order fulfillments are run efficiently during the peak holiday shopping period, everyone wins: you can push out more product and maximize revenue, and your customers will see you as a reliable vendor to keep ordering gifts from.