You stopped getting stuck in the throngs of the “Black Friday” holiday shopping crowd years ago. In fact, you’ve mostly stopped shopping outside of your own home. Storefront accessibility on your computer has just made it far too easy to do your shopping at home while avoiding the crowds. However, online stores have to do just as much preparation as physical locations do to get ready for the holidays.

“Real world” stores prepare themselves for the holiday shopping rush by hiring seasonal staff and adjusting the placement of key items on the shelves. Believe it or not, eCommerce stores have to do the same thing. Additional traffic online can jam up connections, making the online store run too slowly. Before the consumer can press “check out” on the online shopping cart, he’s gotten bored and moved on to another store. As a result, eCommerce stores must boost their bandwidth and make their sites run more smoothly before the holiday rush.

Although sites want to run more efficiently, they don’t want to be simplified. Targeted advertising (such as Amazon’s “people who bought this also liked” approach) is a terrific way to get people to buy more during the holidays. Sites make use of simple software to improve this type of advertising while cutting back on major bandwidth consumption items like video.

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