With the new site launch just a few months ago, another celebratory milestone has arrived for our client Raleigh. To commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Raleigh Burner, they commissioned 350 limited edition Team Aero Pro Burners to be remade and sold to the public. Unsurprisingly, the demand was huge and required some meticulous planning to make sure their website coped with the huge spike in traffic.

The Legendary BMX was faithfully recreated to replicate the iconic original Team Aero Pro Burner from the 1980’s, a bike which went on to take the 1985 World BMX Championships. The man who rode it to a win was Craig Schofield who won the World Title in the Superclass 20 inch category in Whistler, Canada.

customer experience checkout traffic spike success

Pre-Registration Phase

A pre-registration process was undertaken back in April. This process was designed to help both Raleigh and iWeb gauge and then ring-fence the amount of interest there was likely to be for the 35th anniversary bikes. In total, around 7,000 potential customers pre-registered their interest in buying a Pro Burner.

Upgraded Hosting

In anticipation of the big increase in traffic on the Raleigh site during the course of the anniversary sale, iWeb not only upgraded hosting capabilities but also carried out several load and performance tests.

Once this was done, we decided that the user experience would be improved by introducing a queue system to manage the sale window smoothly.

Queue System

Functioning as a third-party service on the Raleigh site, ‘Queue-it’ was introduced for the morning of the 19th July – sale day! Working as a virtual waiting room, if users logged in to the site before 8:30am then their position in the queue would be randomised. If users visited the site after 8:30am, they were placed at the back of the queue.

Customers saw this countdown clock before the sale went live at 9:00am

Once the sale was live, customers who accessed the site would be able to see stats relating to queue length, volume and their position in the queue.

customer experience checkout traffic spike success

Using the Queue It application, we were able to maintain control of the website overload during the extreme traffic peak by letting a fixed number of users through to the site. This, in turn, ensured fairness and better customer experience for Raleigh’s queueing customers.customer experience checkout traffic spike success

Checkout Re-Configurations

It was configured that only one bike per customer could be purchased. iWeb also updated order integration in the back-end, offering custom shipment options and payment logic in the checkout area (a non-finance option).

Customer Follow-Up

It was important for both iWeb and Raleigh to keep their customers in the loop about the special bike sale, both for those who successfully checked out and for those who missed out on a bike.

Follow up emails were sent to everyone who had pre-registered their interest containing some free commemorative 35th anniversary Aeroburner stickers and a 10% discount on any Raleigh bike – a nice way to say thank you and offer some consolation for all those who missed out.

customer experience checkout traffic spike success

 

Overall Outcome

The 35th-anniversary sale was not only a great success for Raleigh, but the smooth-running of the occasion was equally a source of celebration. All the bikes sold out in just one hour and over 5,000 visitors visited the site on the morning of the sale – all in all, a great success!