How Technical Stability Shapes Commercial Confidence
For every business, a major trading event is the biggest test of your eCommerce platform. Whether it's Black Friday, warm weather peak or a new product launch, how your website performs during this key period can make or break your month, your quarter and maybe even your annual trading. Which is exactly why performance strategy has to be for life, not just for Christmas (peak).
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Our recent joint ecommerce report, written with Athos Commerce and Akoova, suggests luck is doing more heavy lifting than most would like to admit.
Only 30% of businesses made it through peak trading without seeing something crack - slowdowns, checkout failures, outages, API timeouts, you name it. Put differently: seven in ten brands stepped into their most commercially critical weeks with systems that flinched under pressure.
The report makes it obvious that capability and confidence are out of sync. Businesses want to innovate, but their platforms don’t consistently earn that trust. If your site feels vulnerable at peak, it naturally limits how far and how fast you’re willing to move for the rest of the year, and that restraint becomes visible in roadmaps, investment levels and experimentation.
The irony is that performance issues rarely start as dramatic failures. They creep in quietly. A little extra load here, an extra dependency there, a codebase that isn’t quite as lean as it was, a deployment process that’s harder to trust than it should be. Eventually, these things collide with the realities of modern ecommerce: more channels, more traffic spikes, more APIs, more personalisation engines pulling data in real time.
Performance becomes an anchor. Not because platforms aren’t capable, but because no one is looking at the whole system in motion.
In our report, Akoova CEO Osvaldo Spadano talks from a place of great experience about the difference between firefighting and true continuous improvement, and how few organisations ever make the leap. In our world, that leap isn’t about tooling or even process. It’s about confidence.
When you’re confident in your platform, you make bolder decisions.
When you’re not, you optimise cautiously, fix reactively, and cross your fingers at peak.
The report shows that 2025 was to be a year of “steady progress.” Teams want to move, but not too fast; invest, but not too much; innovate, but not everywhere at once. And that makes sense - you can’t build adaptive, AI-driven, multi-channel experiences on foundations that only feel stable three weeks a year.
But where is that mindset taking us in 2026?
This is exactly what we’re digging into in our webinar on 10th December.
I’ll be joined by Akoova, Athos and Numatic, parent company to the legend that is Henry Hoover. Performance isn’t a support issue, or a dev issue, or a hosting issue - it’s a business capability, and it’s the one capability that quietly decides who grows and who stays still.
