Peak season—it can make or break your year. Demand is high, and so are customer expectations. Meaning: The pressure is on. You can’t afford for key systems to fail. Why not? Because you’ll lose sales, and your reputation.
We’ve all heard the nightmare stories. One company’s site was down. Another was slow. Pages wouldn’t load. Orders took forever to process. Orders were canceled. Deliveries were late.
No one wants to be that brand. The one that everyone talks about—for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, customer expectations are higher than ever. In what way?
They expect you to show them accurate inventory availability. With accurate delivery and pickup estimates. Based on real-time sourcing decisions *before* they place an order.
They also want to see this earlier in the buying journey. Not just at checkout, but on your Product Listing Pages (PLP) and Product Details Page (PDP) as well. But if you don’t have systems that can scale, they’ll end up disappointed. Why?
Many ecommerce sites—especially during peak season—end up showing:
- Stale inventory availability data that is many hours old.
Why? Because inventory feeds aren’t optimized to make sure the highest velocity items are processed first. This can lead to canceled orders which erode customer trust.
- No estimated delivery or pickup options on the PLP or in search results.
This lack of visibility can significantly reduce add-to-cart rates.
- Promise dates that are very rough ranges, and not based on real-time sourcing decisions.
This can erode customer confidence and reduce order conversion rates.
- Or worse: Showing nothing at all!
Many systems fail to keep up with the load. So how can you avoid that?
The order management system with proven scalability
Enter Fluent Order Management. The enterprise solution that lets you manage inventory availability and process orders at scale. Especially during peak loads. Here are some real-world results:
Over the Black Friday peak week in 2023, Fluent Order Management easily processed:
- 1.2B inventory position updates (234% YoY increase)
- 28.9B API calls (275% YoY increase)
- 5M peak API calls per minute
All with 100% uptime.
“Thanks to the brilliant, combined efforts of our Head Office & Store Associates, as well as the Fluent Commerce Order Management System, the ALDO Group was able to fulfill Black Friday Week order volumes up to 7X in size versus the week prior, in equal or even half the fulfillment time across certain store networks. Amazing planning, execution & teamwork!”
– Marc Chretien, VP Post-Purchase Operations & Business Analytics | ALDO Group
“This was one of the quickest implementations I have ever seen. At only 14 weeks from start to finish. We launched a new OMS when everyone else was in a code freeze in November and went live with omnichannel 2 weeks before Black Friday.”
– Monica Provenza, Director of Omnichannel & Experience | Psycho Bunny
But not all peak loads fall within traditional holiday periods.
The good thing is Fluent Order Management customers can feel confident they’re ready for peak loads, no matter when they occur. Here are four real-world examples:
- One customer launched a TikTok influencer campaign which resulted in a flood of customers. And Fluent Order Management’s dynamic scaling let them show accurate availability to 30-80k customers during a 15 minute spike in demand. No issues.
- During a sale event, one customer sold 300k units of stock in 6 minutes.
- During a flash sale another customer was able to process 181 orders per second.
- Another customer shows 24 live product availability options in under 500 milliseconds on their PLP (both pickup and delivery options across 12 items) based on real-time sourcing decisions.
Are you confident your systems can scale to meet that demand?
It’s all about the architecture and underlying tech
Over the past 18 months, Fluent Commerce has doubled down on ‘must have’ performance and scalability. Tech investments include:
- Upgraded all environments to the latest database version and latest generation hardware which has resulted in a 20-30% uplift in performance
- Rearchitected applications and their underlying compute containers to to improve the demand based scaling response time by 300%
- Rearchitected inventory processing to use Apache Spark to enable real-time petabyte sized data processing
Without robust, underlying tech, you simply can’t scale with confidence to meet peak season demand. But imagine if you did feel confident your systems could scale…
Be the hero
Not only would you avoid embarrassing press coverage, but negative TrustPilot reviews as well. You’d make more sales. Reduce canceled orders. Increase inventory turns. Hit revenue goals. Have happy customers. And a happy business. Isn’t that worth learning more about?
To learn more about how Fluent Order Management can help you scale your inventory availability accuracy and order processing, contact us today.
