Introduction

Across the dynamic retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries, peak seasons and major shopping events can make or break a company's annual performance. U.S. Census Bureau data shows that core retail sales during the 2023 holiday season grew 2.8% over 2022 to a record $1,831.4 billion. As consumers' reliance on e-commerce continues to grow, the ability to effectively scale infrastructure and maintain high availability is critical for a smooth and successful peak season. AWS customers in the retail and CPG sectors are increasingly leveraging cloud services to power their most critical sales periods, from the winter holiday rush to back-to-school season and major retail events, such as Amazon Prime Day. However, preparing for these spikes in traffic and activity requires careful planning and optimization of the underlying infrastructure and applications.

This article provides in-depth guidance and best practices to help retail and CPG companies use AWS services to successfully navigate their peak seasons and high-profile sales events. The insights that are shared in this article are based on the extensive experience of AWS in supporting customers through some of the world's largest e-commerce events.

Understanding the retail and CPG peak season landscape

Retail and CPG companies encounter a number of major events throughout the year that require special preparation and planning, such as the following:

• Holiday season: The winter holiday shopping period, from Black Friday through the end of the year, is by far the most important and high-stakes time for most retailers and CPG brands. This roughly 6-week window can account for 20% to 40% of a company's annual sales. Key dates include Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year's Day.

• Back-to-school season: The back-to-school timeframe, typically from July through September, is a critical peak period for retailers and CPG manufacturers that serve the education market. Families preparing children for the new school year drive high demand for products, such as school supplies, clothing, and electronics.

• Prime Day (Amazon): Amazon's annual Prime Day sales event that’s usually held in mid-July has become one of the biggest shopping holidays worldwide. Many other major retailers and brands now run their own concurrent promotional campaigns to capture a piece of the heightened consumer spending during this period.

• Singles Day (China): Singles Day, held every November 11th, is the world's largest shopping holiday. This holiday originated in China, but is now drawing global participation. Alibaba's Singles Day event in 2022 experienced over $84 billion in gross merchandise volume, highlighting the immense scale and importance of this event for retailers and CPG brands with a presence in the Chinese market.

Retail and CPG peak event use cases

Although the high-level goals of peak season preparedness are consistent across the retail and CPG industries, the specific use cases can vary. Here are some common scenarios of how AWS supports you:

• Manage surging web traffic and e-commerce: E-commerce platforms are the lifeblood of most retail and CPG businesses, especially during peak seasons. It’s important to make sure that these sites and applications can seamlessly handle massive spikes in traffic. AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB, provide the scalability and performance to maintain a fast, reliable customer experience. For more information, see Architecting a highly available serverless, microservices-based ecommerce site. You can use AWS Resilience Hub to define your resilience goals, assess your resilience posture against those goals, and implement recommendations for improvement based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Within AWS Resilience Hub, you can also create and run AWS Fault Injection Service (AWS FIS) experiments that mimic real-life disruptions to your application. These experiments help you better understand dependencies and uncover potential weaknesses.
• Power customer service and support: Peak seasons bring an overflow of customer inquiries, orders, and issues that must be handled efficiently. AWS services, such as Amazon Connect, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Comprehend, offer intelligent and scalable customer service solutions to keep up with such demands. For more information, see Guidance for a modern contact center for retailers on AWS.
• Support supply chain and logistics: Retail and CPG companies rely on complex supply chain and logistics operations to fulfill orders and send products to customers. AWS provides services, such as AWS Supply Chain, that unifies data and provides machine learning (ML)-powered actionable insights, built-in contextual collaboration, demand planning, supply planning, n-tier supplier visibility, and sustainability information management. AWS Supply Chain can connect to your existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management systems to provide on-time, accurate order fulfillment. For more information, see Intelligent supply chain solutions from AWS.
• Analyze and act on real-time insights: The ability to rapidly ingest, analyze, and act on data is crucial during peak seasons. With Amazon Q in QuickSight, retail and CPG companies can ask questions in natural language about their data and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations. With these tools, you can also easily generate data-driven insights about customers shopping habits, such as buying frequency, preferred shopping channels, point usage rates, demographics, and location.

Based on our extensive experience in supporting customers through major events, we've identified the following several key best practices and lessons learned for successful peak season readiness:

• Conduct thorough capacity planning: Accurately forecasting and provisioning the right amount of infrastructure capacity is critical. Underestimating customer needs can lead to performance issues and lost sales, while overprovisioning wastes resources. Make sure to model traffic patterns and reserve the optimal mix of on-demand and reserved capacity.
• Stress test your applications and infrastructure: Comprehensive load testing across the full technology stack is essential for identifying and addressing potential bottlenecks or points of failure. This must be an ongoing process and not a one-time exercise to account for evolving architectures and seasonal fluctuations. For more information, see Distributed load testing on AWS.
• Streamline operational processes: Efficient, well-documented operational processes and runbooks are key to maintain control and rapidly resolve issues during peak seasons. Review and optimize operational plans.
• Prioritize visibility and observability: Robust monitoring, alerting, and observability are vital for detecting and troubleshooting problems in real-time. You can work with AWS to define critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), set appropriate thresholds, and create intuitive dashboards to provide full stack visibility.
• Foster cross-team collaboration: Running a successful peak season requires seamless coordination between development, operations, customer service, and other teams. Facilitate collaboration and communication to make sure that everyone is aligned and empowered.
• Conduct post-event retrospectives: After each major peak season or event, conduct a thorough retrospective to identify successes, failures, and opportunities for improvement. This helps you become better prepared in future years.

AWS Countdown Premium accelerates your AWS Well-Architected journey

The common thread across all these peak seasons and events is the need to rapidly scale infrastructure to handle surging traffic and activity, while maintaining high performance, reliability, and cost efficiency. If you aren’t prepared, then you might encounter site crashes, long checkout lines, and stockouts that severely damage the customer experience and your company's reputation. To help you navigate these high-stakes peak seasons, AWS offers a specialized support program called AWS Countdown Premium. AWS Countdown Premium provides access to a dedicated team of AWS experts who guide you through every stage of preparing for and running a successful peak season event.

AWS Well-Architected Review: The AWS Well-Architected Framework is used to assess the architecture of your workloads against best practices across six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. This comprehensive review identifies potential risks or weaknesses that might affect performance and availability during peak seasons.

Operational Readiness Review (ORR): These in-depth assessments evaluate your operational mechanisms, including risk management, deployment processes, monitoring, and team structure. The goal is to make sure that all the people, processes, and tools are optimized to support the demands of peak seasons.

Security review: Maintaining the security and integrity of systems is important, especially for high-profile retail and CPG events. AWS offers support in launching security tools, including AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Security Hub, that provide ongoing evaluation of security posture, along with actionable insights for mitigating risks.

Infrastructure scaling: AWS Countdown Premium engineers help you determine the optimal infrastructure scaling strategy, such as leveraging auto scaling, reserving additional capacity, or a combined approach. The focus is on making sure that infrastructure can handle anticipated traffic surges without performance degradation.

Monitoring and observability: Effective monitoring is critical for detecting and resolving issues in real-time during peak seasons. AWS Countdown Premium helps you identify monitoring, alerting, and observability capabilities that are tailored to your specific applications and workloads.

Load testing: AWS Countdown Premium engineers guide you on load testing and help you fine-tune alarm thresholds against their relevant resources. An escalation matrix and communication plan must be in place before the event and have owners assigned to all high-priority risks.

Post-event retrospectives: After a major peak season event is completed, your infrastructure resources can be ramped down. This is one of the many benefits of running your workloads on AWS. A post-event retrospective helps identify gaps in your processes and creates a baseline for similar future events. You can use the retrospective to focus on incidents during the event window, runbook effectiveness, monitoring effectiveness, a communication plan, and the performance of dependent services.

Conclusion

Preparing for peak periods is vital for retailers, CPG brands, and other businesses. Failure to properly scale infrastructure, maintain application performance, and establish operational readiness can result in lost revenue, damaged customer trust, and long-term loss of reputation. Through the specialized support of AWS Countdown Premium, retail and CPG companies can take a comprehensive, end-to-end approach to peak season preparedness. AWS Countdown Premium helps you increase your infrastructure investment return by accelerating migrations and modernizations. You can use it to deliver high-impact, go-live events and achieve your business goals. From AWS Well-Architected Reviews to operational optimization and post-event retrospectives, designated engineers with AWS Countdown Premium partner closely with you to identify and address risks, optimize processes, and unlock the full potential of the AWS cloud. That way, you can transform peak seasons and events from a source of stress and uncertainty into a reliable driver of growth and customer satisfaction.

To learn more, see AWS Countdown Premium. To sign up, open the AWS Support Center.

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About the authors

Ross Dyer

Ross Dyer is a Senior Manager of Solution Architecture at AWS who works with executives of enterprise clients in the retail and CPG industry. He is passionate about solving his customer’s business challenges with innovative solutions. Ross has 20 years of experience in leading teams of architects for enterprise and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies.

Matt Barbieri

Matt Barbieri is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS who is based in New York City. With nearly 10 years of experience as a former AWS customer, he guides retail and CPG enterprise clients through their digital transformation and cloud adoption journey in AWS. Matt uses his in-depth understanding of the challenges faced by enterprise companies to help these organizations build secure, compliant, and operationally excellent solutions in the AWS cloud.