Blogs > How Pismo flawlessly handled the Black Friday surge
30 November –

How Pismo flawlessly handled the Black Friday surge

The Pismo platform effortlessly processed [transactions] during Black Friday 2022 without disruption or difficulty

Alexander Hamilton
3 min

Pismo helped process over 10 million transactions across Black Friday last week, more than 421,000 every hour. Despite experiencing a 30% larger volume across its systems and dealing with 117 payments every second, Pismo’s platform ran as smoothly as ever.

The 10 million figure (10.118 million to be exact) is an almost 80% increase on Black Friday 2021. Transactions across our platform peaked at 13:00 GMT, when 718,000 payments were made, or 200 every second.

Spending on Black Friday reached new highs worldwide as consumers returned to retail stores and shopped online for deals. Spending rose by 12% compared to 2021, while Adobe Analytics reported online sales of $9.12 billion.

Preparation is key

Pismo, as ever, was ready for the surge in demand. Precise preparatory work and communication with clients meant everyone involved felt confident about both Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday.

Black Friday is one of the most important days of the year for retail commerce. Retailers and companies offer discounts throughout the month, peaking on Black Friday proper, to entice customers to spend.

Following our experience from 2021, we knew Black Friday would impact teams, including payments, banking, seller management, and transaction authorisation. Actions and priorities were created for each squad.

The Pismo platform can scale when required. Yet we also made some manual changes, allowing extra room to ensure any sudden surge in demand was easily met. At Pismo, we also utilise chaos engineering to simulate failures and downtime, preparing us for even the most unlikely eventualities.

Our engineers and technical account managers opened lines of dialogue with clients and created “war rooms” to discuss ongoing needs and strategies. These preparatory exercises were complete, and our teams watched the Pismo platform handle the new demands with ease.

Business as usual

Throughout the week and on the day of Black Friday itself, clients raised no issues, and the system provided no problems. Pismo’s infrastructure scaled as necessary, but no schedules needed changing, or any processes needed to halt. All regular operations continued as usual, even as demand and traffic rose worldwide.

Such was the success of 2022’s operation that it will serve as a template for all significant holidays going forward.

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