Are you ready for the first 'Cyborg Monday'?

"Every holiday season feels high stakes, but 2025 may be the most unforgiving yet. Consumer demand remains resilient, but retailers are facing a tangle of economic headwinds, from tariffs and supply chain volatility to rising ad costs and leaner teams. In an uncertain economy, the margin for error shrinks, and the cost of a slow site or a fragile storefront grows even steeper."

"For years, retailers have measured holiday readiness by promotions, inventory planning, and staffing strategies. But there's a blind spot: performance readiness. How fast, resilient, and visible your digital storefront is when shoppers show up can determine whether you hit your holiday forecast or miss it by millions. The challenge is that many e-commerce leaders still operate under assumptions that no longer hold true. These assumptions quietly undermine performance and cause retailers to stumble at the moment they most need to shine."

"Assumption 1: Performance Is a Side Project Retail leaders spend months calibrating promotional calendars, forecasting inventory swings, and allocating marketing budgets. Yet digital performance gets treated like an afterthought, or a box to be checked by IT. In reality, it is a revenue program. What happens in the first few hundred milliseconds of a visit sets the tone for everything that follows and has measurable consequences."

2025 presents heightened retail risk as resilient consumer demand meets tariffs, supply chain volatility, increasing ad costs, and leaner teams. Performance readiness—site speed, resilience, and visibility—determines whether holiday forecasts are met or missed. Many e-commerce leaders treat digital performance as an afterthought, but the initial milliseconds of a visit influence conversions, cart completion, and marketing ROI. Slow load times drive abandonment; 63% of shoppers abandon pages taking longer than four seconds, and shaving one second can lift mobile conversions by 3%. With rising acquisition costs and fragile supply chains, optimizing digital performance is a dependable lever to increase revenue from existing traffic.

Read at Fast Company