How fabric Delivered 100% Uptime During the Holiday Rush

‘Tis the season…for immense pressure on every retailer’s technology stack. With tens of billions of dollars in sales jammed into the few days after Thanksgiving, it’s a holiday tradition for retailers and their customers to experience some outages and the frustration of not getting that fantastic Black Friday deal for the perfect holiday gift.

fabric customers, however, didn’t have any of those issues because our stable, scalable omnichannel commerce platform delivered 100% uptime over the biggest shopping weekend of the year! No website timeouts, no in-store customers standing in long lines due to offline POS, and no missed shopping opportunities. 

The holiday challenge

The Black Friday to Cyber Monday “Cyber 5” holiday shopping rush generated over $41 billion in retail sales this year, up more than 8% over 2023. With that kind of pressure across retail channels, it’s to be expected that some retailers will experience outages of in-store and online systems. 

In 2024, nearly 200 million shoppers hit online and brick-and-mortar stores for some great deals and an early start to the holiday shopping season. Over 87 million shopped online on Black Friday, and 64 million clicked for deals on Cyber Monday, continuing their reign as the number-one and number-two, respectively, biggest online shopping days of the year.

With so many shoppers ready to spend, every second of downtime is lost revenue and profits for retailers on any channel. Back in 2021, Amazon had a one-hour outage that cost it $34 million in sales – and that was in the month of June. In 2023, the average cost of downtime for the retail industry was $1.1 million per hour, and that’s across the entire year.

Considering that a bit more than 15% of holiday sales occur over the Cyber 5 weekend and that holiday sales make up as much as 26% of annual revenue for some retail segments, the cost of holiday downtime is no joke for retailers.

fabric’s holiday peak trends in numbers

Uptime equals sales, and downtime equals lost sales. That’s why we continue to invest a lot of time and resources in developing a modern platform for omnichannel retailers that delivers around the clock and all year. We’re incredibly proud of how the fabric platform has delivered for our customers this holiday shopping season.

fabric’s performance shows the strength of our platform under such immense shopping pressure, and we’ve been able to handle these massive volumes while also growing the traffic across our platform. 

Here are just a few key fabric statistics from Cyber 5 weekend compared with 2023:

• 100% uptime
• >100% increase in checkouts per day
• 243% increase in coupon redemptions
• 91% increase in API calls
• 88% increase in refreshes of product data

For fabric customers, this is what they expect. And we’re happy to deliver a stable platform during such an important time of the year.

Awe-inspiring was the performance of one of our home goods customers, who had a 70% increase in gross merchandise value (GMV) and orders. fabric also helped ensure a seamless experience for one of our fashion retail customers, where AOV increased by 2.44% and our 100% uptime, fast API responses, and reliable order processing kept its shoppers happy during the busiest time of year.

Across all of our customers, we saw a 12% increase in BOPIS, making 100% uptime especially crucial as customers and staff hop across web, mobile, inventory, POS, and other online and in-store capabilities to close each sale.

fabric’s scalability in action

Our ability to deliver 100% uptime over the Cyber 5 weekend points out the scalability of the fabric platform. Seeing checkouts more than double and our API call volumes nearly double while BOPIS had a 12% increase proves the scale fabric is capable of. 

Consider the 243% increase in coupon redemptions this year versus last. It reflects the value our customers see in fabric Offers and how crucial offers, coupons, and other promotions are to retailers during this time of year. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are synonymous with discounts, so keeping those offers rolling keeps customers happy.

Remember, fabric accomplished this increase in scale with zero downtime over the holiday shopping weekend.

From holiday peaks to everyday performance: fabric has you covered

We continue to build, expand, and enhance the best omnichannel commerce platform our customers can depend on, and their customers can browse and buy on the slow days, busiest days, and every day in between. 

This year, 2024, was a banner year for omnichannel retailers, especially those running on the fabric platform. As 2025 looms large, we remain committed to increasing the reliability and scalability of our platform. 

How have your holiday sales been this season? If you see some room for improvement or struggle with uptime, give us a shout and schedule a demo. We’re as positive as our Black Friday/Cyber Monday uptime — 100% — that you’ll be happier on the fabric platform.

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