Ensuring Seamless Customer Experience During High-Traffic Retail Events
Industry:
Specialty Retail
Region:
North America (Hundreds of stores and e-commerce operations)
Technology:
Apache JMeter, AWS (EC2, S3, RDS), SQL Server, React, Dynatrace
About the Client
The client is a cloud-based retail platform that enables product browsing, promotions, in-store coordination, and seasonal campaign launches. Its key features include real-time inventory and price updates, multimedia product pages with videos and images, holiday and seasonal campaign management, and store and warehouse-level reporting for operations teams.
Challenges
During peak shopping events—such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and seasonal promotions—the platform faced critical performance issues that directly impacted revenue and customer experience. Key challenges included:
- Checkout slowdowns caused by real-time inventory validation delays
- Admin panel lag during bulk price updates and promotional asset uploads
- Failures when uploading high-resolution media for product listings
- Delayed dashboard rendering across multi-store performance reports
Solutions
A targeted JMeter test suite was developed to simulate real-world API traffic across functional areas:
- Checkout workflow with inventory validation
- Enabled CDN-backed chunked uploads for product images to reduce failures
- Implemented lazy loading on the React frontend to reduce initial payload
Results
- Checkout and product APIs responded in <2.5 sec for 90% of peak user sessions
- Media upload success rate improved by 93%, with no timeouts during concurrent uploads
- Completed a 48-hour soak test with stable CPU, memory, and connection pools.
- API error rates reduced from 6.5% to <0.4% during peak load and campaign launches
- Infrastructure efficiency improved, with AWS autoscaling reducing idle costs by ~30%
