"Shop ‘Til You Drop" Could Take on New Meaning in Online Black Friday Sales

Karthik Suresh
Catchpoint
Learn more about Catchpoint

The holidays are almost upon us, and retailers are preparing well in advance for the onslaught of online consumers during this compressed period. The Friday following Thanksgiving Day has become the busiest shopping day of the year, and online shopping has never been more robust. But with supply chain disruptions limiting merchandise availability, customer experience will make the difference between clicking the purchase button or typing a competitor's web address.


Opening much earlier than usual and extending their evening hours, it was a common expectation for retailers and their sales staff to face crowds of waiting customers excitedly pressing against tempered glass doors. Once they opened the doors and stepped back, a sea of humanity would sprint down the aisles, eagerly searching for the best deals. To ease the madness and congestion of Black Friday events, retailers have started their sales weeks earlier. With increased consumer demands and an upward spending trend, retailers are cautiously projecting a banner year for holiday sales. The climate seems ripe for consumers to cast off the restrictive woes of the long pandemic and spend.

Plenty of Cash to Spend

The shock of the pandemic left over 40 million Americans unemployed and created an economic downturn that hadn't been seen since the Great Recession. Job loss and scores of retail business closures put a major dent in consumer spending.

Now the American economy is once again on the upswing, with jobs coming back and people ready to spend their accumulated savings. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, there was a sharp increase in savings as a percentage of disposable personal income, from 7.2% in December 2019 to a record 33.7% in April 2020. From March to April of 2020, the savings rate nearly quadrupled.

Black Friday is business-critical for retailers, with 30% of retail sales occurring between Black Friday and Christmas. Online Black Friday spending in 2020 reached $9 billion, growing by 22%, and $14 billion for the entire Black Friday weekend. Overall, the 5-day Black Friday to Cyber Monday period brought in $34 billion, accounting for 18% of total online sales for the year.

In Online Retail, "Shop 'til You Drop" Leads to Lost Revenue

Consumers have become weary with the effort involved in a trip to a physical store. Filling the car with gas, waiting at traffic lights, slowing down on congested roads and freeways, finding parking, and wading through crowded aisles can seem tedious and time-wasting in this digital age. During the most restrictive phase of the pandemic stay-at-home orders, consumers turned to their digital devices for everything from groceries and basic essentials, to clothing, home furnishings and more. With this astronomical increase, a new era of digital commerce has commenced. However, online shopping has its own challenges.

When we physically enter a store, there are customer service representatives present who may or may not enhance our shopping experience. Shopping online, the app or web interface is the service representative. Consumers click, swipe and tap on their smartphones, tablets and laptops to find, select and purchase. When retailer's apps and websites cause friction, are unavailable or too slow, shoppers will drop the connection and move on to a competitor. Their journey across cyberspace has many potential hazards and impediments that go unnoticed until customers experience slow connections, web pages that won't open, and websites with virtual front doors temporarily closed.

When consumers shop online, they travel from their last-mile local ISP, and crisscross a vast web of interconnected long-haul carriers with peering relationships that might not be friendly for some. They're handed off to any number of content delivery networks and DNS providers until they finally reach the retailer's website. But their digital journey doesn't stop there. Behind the scenes and under virtual covers, consumer browsers and apps interact with the retailer's backend servers, network equipment, databases, data analytics, and third-party services.

Web and mobile apps are one piece of a complex and highly distributed technology ecosystem that must deliver a quality user experience. Managing this technology ecosystem takes time, resources, multi-domain expertise and money. Ensuring the user's experience is positive requires end-to-end endpoint and network monitoring.

Monitoring the User Experience Pays Dividends

A key technology and service that helps ensure a quality online experience is monitoring endpoints and network traffic. Having visibility to see where performance or availability issues are, allows them to be resolved quickly before impacting users. If you recently experienced a 404 – Page not found response from Google while accessing your favorite retail site, then please know that it was due to Google Cloud outage. Sites using Google Cloud Platform were impacted due to an issue with Google load balancer.

Protecting and optimizing the user experience is necessary for success. In today's digital economy, online retailers have the extraordinary advantage of acquiring buyers from anywhere around the world, just with a couple of clicks. This makes it all the more important to have geographically distributed monitoring that can scale and support consumers wherever they are. The bar for the user experience has been set, and user demands are high. Meeting user expectations requires supporting device and network diversity. It necessitates proactive detecting, identifying and validating user and application reachability, availability, performance and reliability across an increasingly complex digital delivery chain.

Retailers have traditionally monitored CPU utilization, errors, and latency to correlate the consumer's experience with infrastructure performance. Today, they also monitor multiple user experience metrics with KPIs, including Google's core web vital metrics, like Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift and First Input Delay.

Online Commerce has Forever Changed

As technology continues to evolve, retailers recognize that web and mobile apps can dramatically increase sales, while creating more personalized and dynamic customer experiences. Smart retailers take advantage of technology to accelerate their business growth, and improve their agility and competitive differentiation. Far from being a short-lived blip in how consumers purchase, the pandemic has forever changed the way consumers shop, and how businesses run their operations and manage supply chains.

Black Friday online sales are sure to steadily grow, and retailers will need to continue to adjust processes to meet the rising consumer numbers and needs. Undoubtedly, the success of this shopping model will lead to expansion, from the day after Thanksgiving, to five days between Black Friday and end-of-the month Cyber Monday. Perhaps one day it will simply be called Black November.

Karthik Suresh is Manager, Professional Services, at Catchpoint

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

"Shop ‘Til You Drop" Could Take on New Meaning in Online Black Friday Sales

Karthik Suresh
Catchpoint
Learn more about Catchpoint

The holidays are almost upon us, and retailers are preparing well in advance for the onslaught of online consumers during this compressed period. The Friday following Thanksgiving Day has become the busiest shopping day of the year, and online shopping has never been more robust. But with supply chain disruptions limiting merchandise availability, customer experience will make the difference between clicking the purchase button or typing a competitor's web address.


Opening much earlier than usual and extending their evening hours, it was a common expectation for retailers and their sales staff to face crowds of waiting customers excitedly pressing against tempered glass doors. Once they opened the doors and stepped back, a sea of humanity would sprint down the aisles, eagerly searching for the best deals. To ease the madness and congestion of Black Friday events, retailers have started their sales weeks earlier. With increased consumer demands and an upward spending trend, retailers are cautiously projecting a banner year for holiday sales. The climate seems ripe for consumers to cast off the restrictive woes of the long pandemic and spend.

Plenty of Cash to Spend

The shock of the pandemic left over 40 million Americans unemployed and created an economic downturn that hadn't been seen since the Great Recession. Job loss and scores of retail business closures put a major dent in consumer spending.

Now the American economy is once again on the upswing, with jobs coming back and people ready to spend their accumulated savings. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, there was a sharp increase in savings as a percentage of disposable personal income, from 7.2% in December 2019 to a record 33.7% in April 2020. From March to April of 2020, the savings rate nearly quadrupled.

Black Friday is business-critical for retailers, with 30% of retail sales occurring between Black Friday and Christmas. Online Black Friday spending in 2020 reached $9 billion, growing by 22%, and $14 billion for the entire Black Friday weekend. Overall, the 5-day Black Friday to Cyber Monday period brought in $34 billion, accounting for 18% of total online sales for the year.

In Online Retail, "Shop 'til You Drop" Leads to Lost Revenue

Consumers have become weary with the effort involved in a trip to a physical store. Filling the car with gas, waiting at traffic lights, slowing down on congested roads and freeways, finding parking, and wading through crowded aisles can seem tedious and time-wasting in this digital age. During the most restrictive phase of the pandemic stay-at-home orders, consumers turned to their digital devices for everything from groceries and basic essentials, to clothing, home furnishings and more. With this astronomical increase, a new era of digital commerce has commenced. However, online shopping has its own challenges.

When we physically enter a store, there are customer service representatives present who may or may not enhance our shopping experience. Shopping online, the app or web interface is the service representative. Consumers click, swipe and tap on their smartphones, tablets and laptops to find, select and purchase. When retailer's apps and websites cause friction, are unavailable or too slow, shoppers will drop the connection and move on to a competitor. Their journey across cyberspace has many potential hazards and impediments that go unnoticed until customers experience slow connections, web pages that won't open, and websites with virtual front doors temporarily closed.

When consumers shop online, they travel from their last-mile local ISP, and crisscross a vast web of interconnected long-haul carriers with peering relationships that might not be friendly for some. They're handed off to any number of content delivery networks and DNS providers until they finally reach the retailer's website. But their digital journey doesn't stop there. Behind the scenes and under virtual covers, consumer browsers and apps interact with the retailer's backend servers, network equipment, databases, data analytics, and third-party services.

Web and mobile apps are one piece of a complex and highly distributed technology ecosystem that must deliver a quality user experience. Managing this technology ecosystem takes time, resources, multi-domain expertise and money. Ensuring the user's experience is positive requires end-to-end endpoint and network monitoring.

Monitoring the User Experience Pays Dividends

A key technology and service that helps ensure a quality online experience is monitoring endpoints and network traffic. Having visibility to see where performance or availability issues are, allows them to be resolved quickly before impacting users. If you recently experienced a 404 – Page not found response from Google while accessing your favorite retail site, then please know that it was due to Google Cloud outage. Sites using Google Cloud Platform were impacted due to an issue with Google load balancer.

Protecting and optimizing the user experience is necessary for success. In today's digital economy, online retailers have the extraordinary advantage of acquiring buyers from anywhere around the world, just with a couple of clicks. This makes it all the more important to have geographically distributed monitoring that can scale and support consumers wherever they are. The bar for the user experience has been set, and user demands are high. Meeting user expectations requires supporting device and network diversity. It necessitates proactive detecting, identifying and validating user and application reachability, availability, performance and reliability across an increasingly complex digital delivery chain.

Retailers have traditionally monitored CPU utilization, errors, and latency to correlate the consumer's experience with infrastructure performance. Today, they also monitor multiple user experience metrics with KPIs, including Google's core web vital metrics, like Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift and First Input Delay.

Online Commerce has Forever Changed

As technology continues to evolve, retailers recognize that web and mobile apps can dramatically increase sales, while creating more personalized and dynamic customer experiences. Smart retailers take advantage of technology to accelerate their business growth, and improve their agility and competitive differentiation. Far from being a short-lived blip in how consumers purchase, the pandemic has forever changed the way consumers shop, and how businesses run their operations and manage supply chains.

Black Friday online sales are sure to steadily grow, and retailers will need to continue to adjust processes to meet the rising consumer numbers and needs. Undoubtedly, the success of this shopping model will lead to expansion, from the day after Thanksgiving, to five days between Black Friday and end-of-the month Cyber Monday. Perhaps one day it will simply be called Black November.

Karthik Suresh is Manager, Professional Services, at Catchpoint

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...