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How Ecommerce Businesses Fared During the Last Holiday Season

The 2019 State of E-Commerce Infrastructure Report, from Webscale, analyzes findings from a comprehensive survey of more than 450 ecommerce professionals regarding how their online stores performed during the 2019 holiday season.


Some key insights from the report include:

Revenue and Traffic

While only 34.9% of online merchants expected more than 2X their average monthly site traffic during the holiday season, 41.8% actually ended up at 2X or higher. These numbers become more significant given that more than 29% of online merchants generate almost 50% of their annual revenue during the fourth quarter.

Downtime

"Many are still struggling with downtime and cyberthreats"

24.3% of merchants experienced expensive downtime in excess of 5 minutes on Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2019, while 6.6% of storefronts crashed for more than 30 minutes. In our pre-holiday survey though, only 18.6% of merchants said that they were worried about impending downtime during the holiday shopping season.

Slowness

A pre-holiday survey revealed that 37.2% of online merchants were worried about slow page loads. However, 49.7% of them experienced page load times in excess of 3 seconds, 22.2% had page load times over 5 seconds, and 4.8% had intolerable page load speeds over 9 seconds.

Security issues

Last year, 21% of merchants admitted to experiencing cybersecurity-related incidents, ranging from DDoS attacks to credit card theft attempts, during the Cyber Weekend. This year, the number increased to 32.6%, a significant percentage of the hundreds of thousands of ecommerce websites operating globally.

Hosting Challenges

12.9% of online merchants cited cyberthreats as their #1 challenge on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, 9.4% of merchants were plagued by downtime worries, and 8.9% stated site slowdowns were their biggest concern. Over 18% of respondents reported heavy struggles with all three challenges.

"While we saw some improvements this year, indicating that ecommerce merchants are investing more seriously in their site performance, many are still struggling with downtime and cyberthreats, finding it difficult to manage the infrastructure themselves, or working with providers who lack the depth of cloud expertise to deliver a superior user experience,” said Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale.

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How Ecommerce Businesses Fared During the Last Holiday Season

The 2019 State of E-Commerce Infrastructure Report, from Webscale, analyzes findings from a comprehensive survey of more than 450 ecommerce professionals regarding how their online stores performed during the 2019 holiday season.


Some key insights from the report include:

Revenue and Traffic

While only 34.9% of online merchants expected more than 2X their average monthly site traffic during the holiday season, 41.8% actually ended up at 2X or higher. These numbers become more significant given that more than 29% of online merchants generate almost 50% of their annual revenue during the fourth quarter.

Downtime

"Many are still struggling with downtime and cyberthreats"

24.3% of merchants experienced expensive downtime in excess of 5 minutes on Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2019, while 6.6% of storefronts crashed for more than 30 minutes. In our pre-holiday survey though, only 18.6% of merchants said that they were worried about impending downtime during the holiday shopping season.

Slowness

A pre-holiday survey revealed that 37.2% of online merchants were worried about slow page loads. However, 49.7% of them experienced page load times in excess of 3 seconds, 22.2% had page load times over 5 seconds, and 4.8% had intolerable page load speeds over 9 seconds.

Security issues

Last year, 21% of merchants admitted to experiencing cybersecurity-related incidents, ranging from DDoS attacks to credit card theft attempts, during the Cyber Weekend. This year, the number increased to 32.6%, a significant percentage of the hundreds of thousands of ecommerce websites operating globally.

Hosting Challenges

12.9% of online merchants cited cyberthreats as their #1 challenge on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, 9.4% of merchants were plagued by downtime worries, and 8.9% stated site slowdowns were their biggest concern. Over 18% of respondents reported heavy struggles with all three challenges.

"While we saw some improvements this year, indicating that ecommerce merchants are investing more seriously in their site performance, many are still struggling with downtime and cyberthreats, finding it difficult to manage the infrastructure themselves, or working with providers who lack the depth of cloud expertise to deliver a superior user experience,” said Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale.

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AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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