Tech check: How retailers can prepare for the holiday rush
We’re coming up to one of the busiest times for retailers in Australia, with December alone accounting for 11.3% of annual non-food retail turnover, according to the ABS.
Many consumers likely held off making mid-year purchases, expecting big discounts in the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Boxing Day deals. What does this mean for retailers? An increase in consumer expectations, with demand for seamless experiences, both in-store and online, the make or break for purchase decisions.
Shoppers don’t remember the great experiences as much as they remember the bad ones, which is why it's important for retailers to lay the foundations for a seamless customer experience, well before the expected holiday surge arrives.
Some of the biggest issues that come up working with retail clients in the lead-up to peak periods is around hardware and resourcing.
Firstly, scanners. In certain retail environments, scanners help staff to change the price of items on big discount days, like Boxing Day or Black Friday. When there’s an issue with a scanner, staff can’t mark up or down prices, meaning prices remain fixed.
Additionally, under ACCC guidelines, incorrectly marked prices must be honoured, which means retailers can face further unexpected margin losses.
For omnichannel retailers, whose shoppers move between online and physical stores before making a purchase, having functional, reliable scanners on the floor for real-time stocktaking is critical. There’s nothing worse than a shopper seeing the product they want listed as ‘in stock’ on your site only to go in-store and find it’s not there.
I often tell my clients, “Peak season is approaching. You know you’re going to have more workforce in stores than any other time of the year. Let’s start to build a bit of a buffer on certain hardware like scanners so there’s no disruptions.”
The other big issue comes down to resourcing. I have a client where budget constraints mean their site’s resources, such as memory and bandwidth, are capped, no matter how much traffic comes through to their site. This means when traffic spikes, their server becomes overwhelmed, leading to slow response times or, worst-case scenario, their site crashing.
We all know frustration points, like slow load times, can make or break the customer experience, and too many frustration points can inevitably lead to drop-offs. Lack of resourcing can also have a much more direct impact too. One of my clients told me they lost upwards of $800k in just three hours when their website crashed on one of their biggest retail events of the year.
It really comes down to understanding the traffic trends of your own business and being able to scale up or down through the busier periods—or putting your trust in partners like us who can manage your Azure or AWS infrastructure for you.
Going back in-store, I’ve recently seen an uptick in retailers setting up hybrid POS systems to help them trade online and offline, using local storage to process transactions as needed, which can then be synced to the cloud once connection is restored. By far the biggest perk of having that offline redundancy is that regardless of connectivity, which can be worse at this time of year, you can still trade.
Just last year I worked with a global retailer in helping them set up their own hybrid POS environment, flagging and mitigating any potential risks to deliver a dependable system that means they no longer worry about future network issues.
Another factor that often comes into play for retailers during peak seasons is security. And one of the biggest risks to your business? People. You could have the most rigorous security practices in place, but if you’ve got someone who unknowingly lets in a bad actor, it doesn’t matter. In our recent article on cybersecurity measures, we shared information from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), which found $84 million in losses was self-reported in FY2023-24 from business email compromise fraud alone.
Now’s really about making sure you don’t reduce your security posture to try and cater for the influx of casual employees you might be bringing in to handle the upcoming season. That means upholding casual staff to the same security standards, such as different logins for different people and setting up MFA, you hold your full-time employees to.
I’m working on a project at the moment, helping them build the security foundations to carry them through seasons. This includes consulting with them on security best practices, such as phishing training for staff and how to segment networks.
My biggest piece of advice to retailers in the lead up to the holiday season is to look after your employees. It may seem odd coming from an IT business, but after speaking to multiple clients in the industry, I’m seeing employee safety as one of the biggest priorities.
The latest data from Safe Work Australia found 87% of frontline workers had experienced verbal abuse in 2023, with 12.5% experiencing physical violence. Given we typically have a younger workforce coming in to fill casual shifts over the holiday period, this statistic is doubly alarming.
Not only does retail abuse cause anxiety and stress on the employee, it also puts a strain on retailers who can face lost productivity, absenteeism, high staff turnovers, and reputational damage.
The best way to set yourself up for success ahead of the holiday season is to start planning now. Whether that means stocking up on critical devices, managing resources, or setting up safety best practices, we’re here to help. Get in touch today to find out how our team of experts can make this holiday season smooth sailing.
