How retailers jingle all the way from Black Friday to Boxing Day 

Figures from the British Retail Consortium released this week show that online shopping now accounts for a record proportion of all UK retail sales. Analysts have reported that this year, retailers took more than £1 billion in sales on Black Friday alone with the like of Amazon reporting over 7.4 million sales in the UK, marking it their busiest British sales day on record. Black Friday is the starting gun to the festive shopping season, not only are shoppers expected to spend a further £16.5 billion between now and Christmas, but traditional Boxing Day sales are expected to reach £656 million, 22% higher than last year.

David Maitland, General Manager, EMEA, Couchbase said: “Black Friday was a resounding business success for us and our customers. We helped major retailers, including Europe's leading specialist electrical and telecommunications retailer, handle over seven times the customers as last year – but with none of the technical difficulties. Using disruptive non-relational technology (known as NoSQL) technology to power their e–commerce platforms, our customers can handle large volumes of shoppers on their sites which enables a great user experience and leads to high volumes of transactions.” 

“No matter what the event; Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Manic Monday or Boxing Day sales, retailers cannot rest on their laurels when preparing for major shopping events. With such high volumes of customers, all looking to browse and buy as seamlessly as possible, retailers need the right infrastructure to underpin their critical e-commerce operations. The key to online success is a retail platform which is underpinned by a back-end that provides out-of-the-box in-memory high performance, disk persistence database guarantees, replication and high availability. Non-relational technology, with it’s high availability and unlimited scalability, is helping retailers such as Walmart, Tesco, Dixons and others to prepare for the next big pressure day in the retail sector.” Maitland concluded.  

Online retailers choose Couchbase Server to underpin their website operations in order to reduce bottlenecks and improve the overall experience of customers. Couchbase's open source NoSQL database provides high-performance, flexible data handling and unlimited scalability. As a result, websites are fully available, even during peak times, to ensure maximum sales potential and a great shopping experience.