For e-commerce organizations, peak periods are crucial for the bottom line. In the US, there’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, however, e-commerce sites globally need to plan for the extra traffic and load that happens during holidays and throughout sales. As more and more shopping is moving online, however, the success of the shopping season for the store depends more and more on the ability of its e-commerce applications to serve the high volume of demand.

While many organizations prepare intensively for the season with load and performance testing, it’s impossible for them to foresee every scenario that could affect application performance at a critical time. Here are a few of the most common causes of performance bottlenecks and outages to prepare for this holiday season.