Sapient Slingshot wins Technology Breakthrough of the Year.
Sapient Bodhi ranked #1 for deep research.
Meet Sapient Sustain: context-aware AI for complex IT operations.
3M lines of COBOL → clear specs in 8 weeks.
These priorities will help retailers and CPG brands keep critical IT systems running and protect sales when demand peaks.
October 29, 2026
Loading AI-generated summary...
Every promotion creates a promise: shoppers should be able to find products, complete purchases and receive them when expected. But keeping that promise during peak retail season, when consumer sales surge between October and December, is harder than it looks. Demand surges can expose gaps between commerce, inventory and fulfillment, turning small operational issues into lost sales and frustrated customers.
The trouble starts when these problems develop across systems that are monitored separately. And by the time teams connect the warning signs, the impact on sales and customer experience may already be significant.
For retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, being ready for peak season means understanding how problems across the business are connected and identifying risks early enough to act.
Here are five priorities that can help retailers and brands spot operational risk earlier and respond faster when demand peaks.
A slow product page or failing payment system can cost a sale. During peak season, these problems don’t stay contained. A delay in one system can affect several others, making it harder to find the cause once traffic is at its highest.
You can’t prevent every system failure, but you can be prepared for when it happens. Start with a load-testing plan built around the promotional calendar, historical traffic data and expected demand. Test the journeys that matter most to shoppers, from finding a product to receiving an order confirmation. Include the systems behind those journeys, particularly payment services, inventory integrations and fulfillment readiness.
Pressure-test at a minimum of 150-200 percent of forecast peak demand as a planning target, with higher levels where previous spikes or major campaigns justify them. Sudden surges and sustained traffic place different demands on technology, so both need attention. AWS in particular recommends regular performance testing, capacity planning and recovery exercises ahead of peak retail events. Influencer-driven demand can be less predictable than planned promotions, so ensuring readiness on a rolling basis can make sure you don’t miss any viral moments. Checkout deserves particular scrutiny. Baymard reports an average documented cart abandonment rate of about 70 percent, with reasons for abandonment ranging from complex checkout process to website errors and payment issues. Even thorough testing can’t predict every problem. During live operations, teams need to know when performance is deteriorating and whether a failure in one service is affecting another.
The right platform can give IT teams the visibility they need to prevent problems in the first place. Sapient Sustain, our AI-powered platform for IT operations, connects application performance with incident history to help teams spot problems earlier and investigate recurring failures. During peak season, that context matters when a hiccup in one system begins affecting another.
Teams can use this information to set warning thresholds for page speed and checkout success, decide who should respond when performance slips and prepare rollback plans for changes that cause problems.
Keeping retail operations running during peak demand
A global jewelry retailer needed to keep critical technology running during periods of high demand. Publicis Sapient supported its retail IT operations to address service issues and maintain reliability.
"
82% reduction in major incidents
""
100% SLA achievement for critical incidents
"Few things frustrate shoppers more than discovering that a product advertised in a promotion isn’t actually available when they try to buy it. The risk of getting availability wrong is substantial, costing retailers in the United States an estimated $48 billion.
This risk grows when retailers and brands have disconnected systems that make stock updates or fulfillment issues harder to track. A stock problem rarely stays an inventory problem for long. If updates fall behind during a promotion, marketing may continue driving demand for products that are no longer available. Orders keep coming in, fulfillment teams struggle to meet delivery promises and customer service is left fielding a cascade of complaints. When each team sees only its part of the problem, the business can lose valuable time before anyone recognizes what’s happening.
Platforms like Sustain can help with the technology side of the problem. By connecting incidents with application changes and previous failures, Sustain helps IT teams investigate problems affecting inventory services.
Before a campaign launches, compare promoted products with inventory at the locations expected to fulfill orders. Warehouse stock alone isn’t a reliable measure of availability. A product may be in the network but unavailable for pickup or unable to reach the customer by the promised date.
Merchandising and marketing teams should agree on when to change course. A forecast miss, falling days of supply or rising cancellations may justify adjusting an offer or redirecting demand. Replenishment plans should account for the capacity of both stores and warehouses, especially when promotions shift the usual order mix. Plan how to make things right for customers when issues arise, such as offering store credit to rebuild trust.
A promotion can look successful on paper while creating problems elsewhere in the business. Strong click-through rates or rising order volumes may hide falling stock levels or growing fulfillment costs. Marketing teams need to know when an offer is putting pressure on operations, just as IT teams need to recognize when a pricing or checkout problem is affecting campaign results. Comparing results against a credible control group can help establish whether an offer generated additional sales and profit, rather than simply shifting demand or adding fulfillment costs.
Retailers and brands need to make offer decisions based on what shoppers want and what the business can deliver. Purchase history and browsing behavior can help predict demand, but those insights lose their value when the information behind an offer is out of date. A pricing error or failed promo code can undermine an otherwise relevant offer, leaving shoppers frustrated and marketing teams wondering why conversion has fallen.
Keeping those offers accurate depends in part on the reliability of the systems that support them. Sustain monitors application performance and helps IT teams identify failures affecting pricing or product availability so that they can fix them before more shoppers are affected.
The same shopper may buy gifts, household essentials and party food on the same trip. Each purchase comes with different expectations.
Retailers and brands need to understand what shoppers are trying to accomplish. Someone shopping for a holiday meal needs to know everything on their list is in stock, while a last-minute shopper’s decision may come down to local availability or reliable delivery dates. When stock information is wrong or orders arrive late, even a well-designed shopping experience can fall apart.
AI shopping assistants are also changing how people find products. Adobe expects AI-driven store traffic to increase 130 percent between the 2025 and 2026 holiday seasons. Instead of browsing several websites, a shopper can ask for gift ideas within a particular budget or compare products based on specific criteria. Retailers and CPG brands need to make sure these recommendations reflect accurate product details and current availability. Otherwise, shoppers may arrive ready to buy something the business can’t deliver.
Recognizing these different shopping needs and preferences also helps retailers and brands decide which problems require attention first. By helping keep the systems behind stock availability and order updates running reliably, Sustain equips teams with the knowledge they need to understand where a disruption is most likely to affect shoppers.
"
What happens when store technology fails?
A problem with a store device can delay transactions and disrupt service. Retail store endpoint device management helps teams identify and address technology issues that affect daily store operations.
"Even the best peak-season plans will face unexpected challenges. A popular product may sell out faster than anticipated or a warehouse delay may put delivery timelines at risk. Retailers and brands need the right people available to respond, with clear authority to make decisions. That means planning coverage around major promotions and shipping deadlines, and making sure teams know when to pause a campaign, change an offer or escalate a problem.
The hardest problems to manage are often the ones that cross team boundaries. A drop in checkout conversion might start with a payment failure, while a rise in customer complaints could trace back to delayed inventory updates. When these issues are tracked separately, teams can spend too much time treating the symptoms instead of finding the cause.
Sustain helps close that gap by connecting information about system problems and giving IT teams a clearer picture of what’s happening across the business.
Rehearse likely disruptions before major campaigns launch, including unexpected traffic spikes and fulfillment delays. Teams should know how to respond when these problems occur, rather than working out a plan in the middle of peak season.
Turn preparation into a usable scorecard
Before each major promotion, review the five priorities in one shared scorecard. Record a status, accountable owner, warning threshold and next action for each. Thresholds should reflect your company’s performance baseline and level of commercial risk.
Review these measures together to identify where one problem may be affecting another, then agree on the action needed before the disruption spreads.
Keep the customer promise when demand peaks
Peak-season readiness comes down to knowing where problems are developing and responding before they affect shoppers. That requires a clear understanding of how critical systems depend on one another, backed by people who can act when something goes wrong.
Sustain helps retailers and CPG brands detect issues earlier and resolve recurring failures, while Publicis Sapient’s retail expertise helps teams focus on the disruptions that matter most. Together, they help keep critical operations running when demand surges.
