2024 marked another record-breaking year for holiday ecommerce activity. Online spending during Cyber Week, the five-day shopping period from Thanksgiving through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, increased 8.2% year-over-year to $41.1 billion, according to data from Adobe Analytics. In the peak hours of 8 pm to 10pm, consumers spent $15.8 million every minute.
While the Cyber Week surge can be a boon for businesses, the spikes can quickly prove costly if a company’s web and commerce platforms aren’t prepared to handle it. In one case this year, a major clothing retailer missed out on an estimated $750,000 in sales in one afternoon as the system crashed during a Black Friday promotion.
Smaller specialty retailers feel the pressure, too, they’re expected to deliver a perfect online experience just like the biggest companies.
“Ecommerce has really advanced in the last 10 years, and customer expectations are high,” says Adam Taylor, founder and CEO of online pet supply retailer PetShop.co.uk (opens in new tab), which has been able to stay online without problem despite seeing orders roughly triple during peaks like Black Friday. “To be able to compete against big organizations, you need to have a service offering that not only matches it, but surprises and delights as well.”
Why do websites crash in cases of high traffic? To put it simply, the server infrastructure is unable to handle the high volume of requests coming in simultaneously due to reasons such as non-scalable code, insufficient server resources, or exceeding the network bandwidth allocated by the hosting provider. Reliability during such surges is one of the many reasons that companies rely on NetSuite, which also counts retailers with strong ecommerce channels such as Marine Layer, McGee & Co., and Topo Designs among its more than 41,000 customers.
Pet supply company triples orders during peak season
For PetShop.co.uk, having a system that can scale up and down in the face of changing demand is integral. Since starting with NetSuite over 10 years ago, the company has grown from $1 million in revenue a year to nearly $30 million through customized ecommerce, personalized marketing, and exceptional customer service. Its “Bottomless Bowl” subscription service for pet food is one of its most popular options.

PetShop.co.uk records an average of 2,000 orders a day. During peak periods, such as Black Friday, that number increases to more than 6,000. Even when PetShop.co.uk isn’t doing a sales promotion, the company sees traffic surges in conjunction with other businesses doing a promotional event as consumers decide to stock up on pet supplies while online shopping.
Using NetSuite ERP, NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced, and other modules, PetShop.co.uk can handle the increases in online traffic while still running the numerous custom scripts and workflows the team has created to maximize its customers’ convenience and experience. Particularly since about 60% of the company’s revenue comes from subscriptions, it’s crucial that the system can flex to accommodate new traffic without any slowdown or stoppage around the business’s core business model.
“We’re in a very competitive marketplace so we’ve customized our website and backend to the nth degree to offer maximum convenience,” says Taylor. “When it comes to scalability, we’ve always been able to flex the system very quickly without a worry of it all crashing.”
What’s been crucial for PetShop.co.uk, according to Taylor, is not only NetSuite’s scalable infrastructure, but also its pricing. Companies like his don’t have to buy significant amounts of unneeded capacity to handle the unexpected surges, nor does NetSuite penalize a company’s success by taking a percentage of each transaction.
“It’s key more than ever now to have a software system like NetSuite that is scalable and can deal with increased volumes and surges, but also is affordable and doesn’t tax you for success,” says Taylor.
The NetSuite difference
From Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2024, shopping traffic on the NetSuite platform increased 27% from the same time in 2023. In total, there were more than 11 billion requests served in the system during the four-day period as NetSuite customers made sales, recorded transactions, and checked inventory levels. That’s over 2 billion more than the previous year. Despite increased traffic, NetSuite had 99.9999% overall uptime.
NetSuite runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle’s commercial cloud infrastructure platform. Oracle designed OCI as a next-generation cloud to meet the needs of the largest and most demanding organizations, whether they’re training a new artificial intelligence model or executing real-time banking or telecom transactions. Running on OCI means all NetSuite customers, regardless of size, get the reliability, performance, and security that used to only be available to the world’s largest organizations. It allows them to easily scale up and down with changing volumes of data and bigger workloads without impacting performance.
“The difference with NetSuite is that customers don’t have to buy a bunch of unused capacity to handle the unexpected surges,” says Sam Levy, senior vice president of growth and operations at NetSuite. “NetSuite is ready when those surges happen.”
NetSuite knows leaders like Taylor at PetShop.co.uk have better ways to spend its precious capital. “Businesses don’t want to tie up their precious dollars in unused capacity,” Levy says. “They want to be able to leverage their capital for inventory and operations.”
Learn more about how NetSuite Cloud Infrastructure delivers unparalleled scalability so your business can handle increasing traffic, orders, and growth—without sacrificing performance or customer satisfaction.