Peak season at scale: How commercetools keeps retailers running during the holiday rush (2025 edition)

Every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) mark the most intense pressure test for retailers. These days are synonymous with staggering spikes in online traffic, fierce competition for consumer attention and enormous revenue potential. For many brands, the holiday shopping season — anchored by BFCM — represents 15–20% of annual retail sales.

While peak season isn’t limited to BFCM, with events like Back-to-School and Valentine’s Day driving similar surges, the fact is that the holiday season is of strategic importance for the supermajority of retailers today. 

The BFCM season has evolved throughout the years. Once confined to a two-day weekend of doorbusters and flash sales, it has now expanded, with brands running six-week campaigns blending early urgency driven by product drops and social media surges, core-weekend deals and post-event bundles. In fact, eCommerce sales starting two weeks before BFCM and running through the weekend grew 45% YoY in 2024.

In addition to the expanded promotional period, the following trends are expected for this year’s BFCM season: 

• Mobile-first dominance: Mobile accounted for 57% of online BFCM sales in 2024, up from 51% the prior year. Optimized mobile UX, wallets like Apple Pay, and even push notifications via branded apps became decisive conversion drivers.

• AI-powered personalization: By 2024, AI recommendations alone accounted for US$51 billion during Cyber Week. Predictive personalization is now table stakes.

• Competitive discounting: Smart retailers are going beyond discounts, layering loyalty perks, subscription offers and bundles to defend margins.

• Social commerce + influencers: Live shopping on TikTok and Instagram, plus partnerships with micro-influencers, will drive outsized engagement and conversion.

• Payment innovations: Transactions are becoming increasingly modern. BNPL transactions on Cyber Monday 2024 reached a record US$991.2 million, representing a 5.5% year-over-year increase from US$940 million in 2023. While cards still lead in payment volume, mobile and wallet-based transactions are growing quickly during BFCM, with Apple Pay (7.4%), Google Pay (2.5%) and PayPal (1.6%) the unshakeable leaders. Finally, mobile purchases accounted for 74% of transactions during Cyber Week 2024, up from 69% in 2023. 

• Agentic AI assistants on the rise: In 2025, AI is forecasted to drive 21% of holiday orders ($263 billion). AI-generated traffic has spiked up to 4,700% YoY in some reports. Already, 52% of US consumers say they plan to use GenAI for shopping this holiday season.

For enterprise retailers, these trends are both opportunity and risk. On one hand, sales windows are longer, demand is higher and channels are multiplying. On the other hand, consumer patience is thinner than ever, as shoppers abandon a site after just a few seconds of latency or a single checkout error. Agentic AI-generated traffic is also expected to increase exponentially during this timeframe. 

That’s why platform reliability is business-critical. Downtime or degraded performance during peak moments doesn’t just mean lost sales — it means lost trust. In an era of instant alternatives, customers won’t come back.

commercetools provides a scalable infrastructure that has performed consistently and flawlessly, with zero downtime, throughout the years. During the 2024 Cyber Week, the commercetools Platform handled:

• 9.2B requests with an average response time of 0.2s.

• 4,500 orders per minute, with an average response time of .45 seconds.

• 13M total combined orders from Black Friday through Cyber Monday — a 26% increase from 2023. 

As the partner of choice for brands and retailers to meet customer demand on the fly, this is how we prepare for peak season — and how your business can do the same. 

At commercetools, peak readiness is not an afterthought. It’s built into our DNA as a cloud-native, API-first platform. We know our customers need confidence that their commerce infrastructure will hold under pressure, and we’ve engineered resiliency as a strategic advantage.

Here’s a look behind the scenes at how we prepare our systems for BFCM and other high-traffic moments.

1. Deployment freeze: Stability first

We implement a code deployment freeze for a few weeks during the BFCM season. Why? Because introducing new features or changes during the most critical sales period increases risk. By freezing deployments, we lock down stability so that nothing unexpected interferes with your busiest days.

2. Proactive pre-scaling through elastic infrastructure

Our teams don’t wait for traffic to surge: We pre-scale systems ahead of time to absorb massive loads. Because commercetools is built on cloud-native infrastructure, we can dynamically scale further as demand grows. This means whether your sales double or multiply tenfold, the platform adapts in real time.

3. Load shedding instead of hard rate limits

Many platforms rely on rigid rate limits that simply shut down requests once thresholds are reached. commercetools takes a different approach through a load-shedding mechanism. This means: 

• We prioritize critical transactions.

• We keep the platform serving as many requests as possible.

• We avoid unnecessary cutoffs that could prematurely stop revenue from flowing.

4. 24/7 monitoring and rapid response

Our global operations team monitors platform health around the clock. If we detect unusual error rates (like spikes in error responses, such as 500, 502, 503 and 504), we can dynamically adjust system architecture in minutes.

We also use circuit breaker logic that dynamically reacts to performance and load, allowing the platform to respond in real-time to as many requests as possible. 

The takeaway: commercetools customers head into BFCM knowing the foundation of their eCommerce — uptime, performance and scalability — is covered.

While commercetools handles the platform layer, your application architecture and readiness are equally critical for peak success. Here are our top recommendations to make sure you’re prepared.

1. Communicate campaign and traffic expectations

Transparency is key. If you’re already a customer, work closely with your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to share:

• Planned load testing schedules.

• Anticipated traffic volumes.

• Major campaigns that could trigger sudden bursts.

The earlier commercetools knows your expectations, the better we can align resources.

2. Implement robust error handling

Peak season means more requests and, inevitably, more edge cases. Protect your performance by:

• Adding a unique X-Correlation-Id to every request for faster tracing and debugging, especially during high-volume periods. 

• Configuring your application to capture and alert internal teams to specific exception codes and details returned by the commercetools Platform.

• Implementing exponential backoff for retries, especially on concurrent modifications.

• Designing smart retry mechanisms for transient errors (like network hiccups). A general guideline is a ~2-second timeout for GET requests and ~5-8 seconds for POST requests.

• Logging all errors centrally and reviewing logs frequently to identify patterns, so you can identify and fix underlying technical implementation issues in your application. 

3. Enhance observability

Observability gives you visibility into what’s happening in real time. Best practices include:

• Centralized logging to capture and consolidate error data.

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools to track latency, throughput and bottlenecks.

• Integration with APM tools for observability, providing insights into how well your web application performs. 

Alerting systems to flag anomalies before they impact customers.

4. Optimize API interactions

Every API call counts during peak season. Optimize your usage by:

• Caching static or slow-changing resources to reduce redundant calls.

• Ensuring gzip compression on API requests to compress response times, which is a default feature when using commercetools SDKs (e.g., Java SDK Middlewares). 

• Avoiding unnecessary queries or unbounded searches that stress APIs.

5. Follow performance and load testing guidelines

Use our official documentation to prepare:

• Performance tips cover query optimization and caching.

• Load testing guidelines help simulate realistic peak traffic.

For enterprise-scale retailers, concurrency and throughput management can be the difference between smooth scaling and overwhelmed systems. This is how the commercetools Platform handles parallel requests: 

• Circuit breaker protection: All our endpoints are protected by sophisticated circuit breaker logic. This complex algorithm acts independently across multiple layers to maintain platform stability under heavy loads.

• Concurrent connections: We generally advise that no SINGLE syncing application should maintain more than 20 concurrent connections to the platform.

• Testing for higher throughput: If your business objectives necessitate higher throughput, progressively ramp up your concurrent connections during testing until you observe significant 5xx errors. Should you encounter 5xx errors, a robust retry mechanism with exponential backoff and error handling is critical.

• Ramp-up strategy: For highly concurrent processes and load tests, always ramp up over the first 10-15 minutes. This allows the commercetools APIs to scale effectively to meet your increased demand.

Staggering multiple projects: If you operate multiple commercetools projects that require separate high-concurrency sync updates, staggering their start times can help distribute the load and ensure optimal performance for all.

The holiday shopping season represents both immense pressure and immense opportunity. Shoppers expect speed, convenience and reliability. Retailers expect their platforms not just to survive — but to empower them to thrive.

At commercetools, we’ve engineered peak readiness into the foundation of our platform so you can navigate BFCM with confidence. Brands and retailers, including Pet Valu, L.L. Bean, Ulta Beauty and Interflora UK, and even B2B enterprises like Viewrail, rely on commercetools to scale automatically, handling increased customer demand with speed, stability and reliability during BFCM. 

Combine that with your own application best practices — from caching and observability to error handling and load testing — and you’ll be ready to turn seasonal spikes into long-term customer growth.

Ready to see how commercetools can support your next high-traffic event? Contact our sales team or start our 60-day free trial to learn how your business can scale during BFCM and other important sales events.