Etsy Is Predicting $20,000 In Sales Per Minute On Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is like the Super Bowl of shopping for e-commerce sites. As such, it’s usually not the day to roll out changes to website code. After all, a golden four-hour window during Cyber Monday could make or break or sales. Etsy takes a different tack. For the 14-year-old marketplace, the biggest online shopping holiday of the year–when Etsy sees double the sales and search activity than on a normal day–is not off limits for code tweaks. Etsy continuously deploys code onto the site, sometimes as much as 30 times a day, says Chief Technical Officer Mike Fisher. Continual deployment, he argues, helps keep the staff in the rhythm of making fixes quickly too. “I think that’s the best way to keep things stable.” Cyber Monday 2018 put this strategy to the test. On that day, Etsy’s 2.6 million sellers pulled in an average of nearly $19,000 in gross merchandise sales per minute. In the middle of it all, a tool the company had released in the days leading up to the shopping holiday malfunctioned. Sellers were supposed to have been able to add their items to a sitewide Cyber Monday sale via their online dashboard; the problem was, the tool didn’t recognize some time zones properly. That meant that for some of the sellers further east from Etsy’s Brooklyn, New York, headquarters, their sales automatically closed long before Cyber Monday ended. Read more at Inc.