In 2024, Boots’s website and app went down repeatedly during their biggest-ever Black Friday sale in the UK. The health and beauty retailer’s failure to respond to high demand directly led to millions lost and widespread customer dissatisfaction, with consumers claiming to struggle for hours.
This incident laid bare the stark reality of digital dependency in retail: sub-second precision is not a luxury but a necessity in today’s commerce space. Retailers are grappling with rising costs — from national insurance hikes to inflation — putting pressure on operations from staffing to supply chains. This impacts everything from supply chain management to staffing levels, and therefore, optimising digital performance and efficiency has never been more critical.
When every moment counts, businesses need to re-evaluate and refine their ecommerce operations if they’re to survive in today’s oversaturated retail landscape.
Lessons Learned: The Rise and Fall of Major Retailers
One of Britain’s staple stationery and bookstores, WHSmith, recently announced its closure across all UK high streets. With its deep-rooted Victorian-era origins and once-dominant position, on paper this shop should’ve been destined to succeed. But it was the steady decline in footfall and strategic stagnation – the inability to identify market shifts and adapt to changing consumer demands – that led WHSmith to its impending closure.
Over the years, we’ve repeatedly seen various large-scale retailers and brands fall victim to these problems, with other retail giants such as Debenhams, Topshop, and British Home Stores becoming extinct in the high street. Two mistakes sealed their fate: clinging to legacy systems and fearing disruption more than irrelevance.
While physical stores were once the backbone of retail, today’s shoppers put more emphasis on brands’ online presence, expecting the same (if not better) customer experience. As a result, many of these fallen retailers have transitioned to online-only brands to continue driving revenue and stay afloat. It’s, therefore, imperative that retailers consistently deliver a reliable, stable, and seamless online experience – one that is agile enough to handle a sudden influx of demand.
The Behind-the-Scenes Seamless Online Experiences
The ecommerce landscape is fast-paced and more advanced than ever. However, the stand-out problem many companies have is they’re still trying to operate with legacy systems that weren’t built with the speed, scale, or flexibility that today’s consumers expect.
According to our recent data, 73 percent of retailers are aware of the serious consequences of downtime on their business and its capacity to result in dissatisfied customers and lost sales. During popular, high-stake shopping events – like Black Friday and Cyber Monday – business leaders know that they simply can’t afford downtime in these critical, revenue-driving periods. This is exactly why 55 percent of companies are upgrading their ecommerce platforms, 81 percent are investing in tech improvements, and 77 percent are enhancing social commerce capabilities.
Composable commerce is one solution that addresses these challenges head-on. Built to adapt in real-time, businesses can scale up for large-scale retail events and mitigate the risk of crashes, glitches, or downtime. With a modular architecture, businesses can easily adapt to handle massive traffic spikes, ensuring uptime, stability, and availability. This frees them to focus on more important tasks like innovating, merchandising, or marketing instead of firefighting downtime.
Ulta, Express, The Sharper Image, and Bang & Olufsen are just a few leading retailers using composable commerce to stay ahead. They’re accelerating time-to-market, simplifying experimentation, and strengthening resilience during high-traffic moments. With a flexible, modular architecture, these businesses can easily roll out new channels, payment options, and campaigns, adapting in real-time as customer needs evolve.
Staying Ahead
Commerce is evolving faster than ever, and so are customer expectations. Personalised, frictionless experiences are the norm, not the exception. To stay competitive, retailers must respond to real-time shifts without sacrificing stability or performance.
That means leaving behind brittle, legacy systems in favour of modular, flexible platforms. Because in modern commerce, milliseconds matter. And the brands that can’t keep up risk more than lost revenue, they risk losing relevance altogether.
The author, Neerav Shah, is Vice President International at commercetools.