With the holiday shopping rush approaching, online retailers are preparing for heavier traffic while adapting to changes in how consumers shop. AI-assisted product discovery, mobile shopping and social commerce are changing how customers find and purchase products, placing new demands on the technology behind online storefronts. When traffic surges, even minor technical problems can frustrate shoppers and lead to lost sales.
Getting ready for peak season means looking beyond expected visitor numbers to consider how well the entire online shopping experience functions under pressure. Here, members of Forbes Technology Council identify technical issues retailers should address now and explain how to resolve them before the busiest shopping days arrive.
1. Audit Product Feeds For AI Shopping Readiness
Product feeds are the most powerful tool for showing up in AI shopping experiences. Before peak season, retailers should audit their feeds to ensure they meet new AI standards. Gemini and ChatGPT require far more context to surface products in chat. Missing attributes, inconsistent taxonomy or stale pricing means AI tools will skip products or surface wrong details. Accuracy and speed will drive visibility, separating winners from losers this holiday season. – Adrien Menard, Botify
2. Standardize Product Data Across Platforms
Retailers must fix their product data. AI tools use retailers’ sites, feeds and APIs to make recommendations. When the sources don’t match, AI might show a wrong item or leave a product out entirely. Both cost the retailer a potential sale. To reduce the likelihood of this, focus on standardizing product attributes across all surfaces and make sure changes in inventory are updated in real time. – Jordan Glazier, Wildfire Systems
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3. Sync Inventory Across Sales Channels
Incorrect inventory is no longer just a loss problem; it’s a tech failure and a CX obstacle, too. Today’s shoppers favor online research but in-store purchasing; they arrive knowing what they want and choose the brand they trust to have it ready. If the counts displayed on your website, app or in-store tools don’t match what’s in stock or on its way, you’ll quickly lose holiday shoppers to competitors who have perfected source-to-story inventory management. – Tony D’Onofrio, Sensormatic Solutions
4. Improve Handoffs From AI To Human Support
First, solve AI-to-human handoffs. AI backfires when customers lack human support during high-volume shopping, and delayed resolutions create attrition. Leading retailers deploy AI agents that recognize intent, automate identity verification and route inquiries to human agents with full context, reducing customer frustration and ensuring that human empathy remains the foundation of CX. – Michael Ringman, ibex
5. Load-Test Search And Recommendation Systems
Fix search and recommendation infrastructure before the holiday peak. AI-assisted shopping shifts discovery from browsing to querying. Every agent asking for a “warm winter jacket under $200” hits your retrieval stack, not your homepage. Retailers who stress-tested checkout but never load-tested their search infrastructure will see discovery quality collapse under the load, while the site itself stays up. – Ben Gutkovich, Superlinked
6. Maintain Shopping Sessions Across Channels
Retailers should fix identity and session continuity across the purchasing journey. Customers moving from AI-assisted or social shopping to mobile checkout should not face repeated authentication, lost carts or failed payments. Stress-testing these handoffs and applying risk-based authentication can reduce fraud without adding friction when customers are ready to buy. – Vikram Pande, HCLTech
7. Offer Fast, Familiar Digital Wallet Payments
Holiday shoppers often arrive on their phone, from a social post or an AI recommendation, at a site they’ve never used. Making them type a card number into an unfamiliar form is a good way to lose them. Offer payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay or Venmo, and one is likely to feel familiar and safe. These wallets fill in shipping info automatically, keep card numbers off your site, and are shown to lift conversions. Faster is good. Faster and safer is better. – Luke Wallace, Bottle Rocket
8. Test Every Dependency Behind A Purchase
Don’t just load-test the storefront; test the dependencies behind the transaction. A purchase may cross payment, inventory, identity, fulfillment and third-party services. Under peak load, the failure often isn’t that the website goes down; it’s that one dependency slows and the customer journey breaks. Retailers need visibility into those relationships to detect degradation, understand its impact and intervene before failed transactions become lost revenue. – Casey Kindiger, Droma (formerly Grokstream)
9. Add A Conversational AI Shopping Assistant
Add a visible AI shopping assistant (agent) to your store. Here’s why: Shoppers are conditioned by the AI gods to ask complex questions and have multiturn conversations. Having the same capabilities as an AI agent or conversational search for your store is expected—not to mention the fact that buying gifts is a complex product discovery use case that is better handled by an AI agent or conversational search. – Zohar Gilad, Fast Simon Inc.
10. Strengthen Account Verification Against Fraud
Retailers should fix how they verify who is behind an account before peak season. Bots, AI agents and deepfake-enabled fraud make static checks like passwords and email confirmation easy to beat. Add risk-based step-up verification, triggered only by signals like new devices, address changes or high-value first orders, so genuine shoppers glide through while fraudsters are caught. – Kaarel Kotkas, Veriff
11. Improve Mobile Page-Load Speed
One critical issue is mobile page-load speed and responsiveness. With most holiday traffic coming from phones, slow or clunky mobile sites directly hurt conversion rates and search rankings. Retailers should compress images, minimize JavaScript, leverage caching and use content delivery networks to ensure fast, smooth mobile experiences. Testing under real-world network conditions before peak season prevents lost sales from frustrated shoppers. – Harsh Jangid, Coozmoo Digital Solutions
12. Prevent Duplicate Orders During Checkout Retries
I would fix ambiguous checkout retries by giving each purchase attempt a stable identifier and a clear status check. Test a phone losing signal after payment: The shopper should be able to retry without creating a second order, duplicate charge or support ticket. – Kayode Faturoti, Breet
13. Ensure AI Displays Accurate Deals And Discounts
What happens when AI finds the product, but it doesn’t get the deal or promotion correct? Retailers need to ensure that their AI understands all of the pricing, discounts and perhaps even membership benefits before presenting any offer. If a specific deal that a shopper sees is not the deal they get at checkout, what was supposed to be a quick and convenient experience quickly becomes a reason to lose trust. – Vamshi Noothi, Cisco
14. Optimize APIs For Bot-Driven Traffic Spikes
API payload bloat and slow server response times due to a shortage of capacity or processing power will break your peak season sales. AI shopping bots, mobile users and social commerce apps generate millions of rapid, nonstandard API calls. If your backend architecture is unoptimized, product pages will lag or crash during high-traffic surges. Streamlining organizational API layers and optimizing data caching is key to handling bot-driven spikes. – Mark Brown, The Mark of Security Ltd.
15. Put Customer Expectations Ahead Of AI-First Design
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I think many online platforms have overrotated toward an AI-native, AI-first experience and have not fully walked through the customer journey and the customer experience. Understanding the demographics that you serve and ensuring that you have a truly flawless end-to-end experience is key. If a user’s expectation has been in one direction for many years, a dramatic pivot to AI-first or AI-native may dissuade them from buying. – Erik Jost, Black Box
16. Protect Checkout When Nonessential Features Fail
Retailers should test graceful degradation before peak season. When traffic spikes, nonessential features like recommendations, reviews or personalization should be able to slow down or switch off while search, cart, payment and order confirmation stay healthy. Protecting the core purchase path helps. It keeps a small failure from becoming a lost sale. – Sibasis Padhi, Walmart Inc.
17. Monitor AI Automations For Errors And Drop-Offs
Observability of your automations is crucial. Can you drill into where conversations drop off, where information is wrong, or where people are waiting or getting frustrated with your AI? At peak, volume hides all of it. A small error rate becomes thousands of customers, and the people who would have caught it are buried. Run your evaluations before the season so you can ship a fix without breaking what works. – Jeremy Suriel, Kustomer