How Interdiscount prepared Black Friday traffic

About the company

Interdiscount started in 1966, is the leading omnichannel retailer in the field of home and entertainment electronics with the headquarters in Switzerland.

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The extensive range covers all well-known brands and current trends and innovations. Speed, enthusiasm, and the willingness to change are crucial so that the product selection always meets the customers' needs; of course, at the best possible price-performance ratio.

With around 170 branches and an attractive and user-friendly online shop, Interdiscount offers the densest network of sales outlets in Switzerland in the field of home and entertainment electronics, and is also available to customers online at any time.

Statistics

Industry

Retail

Location

Switzerland

Revenue

$282 Million + (2022)

Employees

32,323 (2022)

Key metrics

Twice a month

Gatling Enterprise users

2 performance testers and 10 engineers

Zero

downtime during high traffic events

Challenges

As an omnichannel retailer, Interdiscount faces huge amounts of traffic during the holiday season. Events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday can create huge spikes of traffic that can lead to performance issues and website crashes.

To avoid any crashes or performance issues, Interdiscount searched for a tool that would help discover their application’s limitations, maintain resilience, and ensure stability during high traffic seasons.

Solution

In 2018, Interdiscount implemented Gatling Enterprise integrated with Jenkins to enable perform load and performance tests during the development process.

With Gatling Enterprise, Interdiscount began load-testing to determine their application’s bottlenecks. With soak testing, they ensured there are no memory leaks and with peak testing, they ensured the application's capacity to efficiently handle traffic even during the peak times of holiday season.

They use Gatling Enterprise’s runs’ history to compare the performance of their application before and after deploying changes to the site to make sure they maintain equal or better performance.

“In order to make sure interdiscount.ch was ready for Black Friday, we opted for Gatling Enterprise as our performance testing solution. It allows us to keep a history of our runs and to compare them easily. Moreover, the live dashboards are a real benefit as they let us see exactly when the website is slowing down during a performance test. Gatling Enterprise is improving our online revenues by maintaining the high availability of our services.“

Joel Rittener, Senior Application Manager, Interdiscount

Results

Since the integration of Gatling Enterprise, smooth management of traffic, even during the holiday season.

Since Interdiscount began using Gatling Enterprise they haven’t run into any issues with traffic during Black Fridays or Cyber Monday and have been able to keep their site up and running even under strenuous traffic conditions.