At Checkout.com, our engineers work hard to ensure that our payments platform can meet the capacity we expect. A system outage can harm revenue and reputation – that’s why we work hard to keep payments running at near 100% uptime year-round. During peak season – Single’s Day, Black Friday/White Friday, Cyber Monday, and more – we put special measures in place to ensure even stronger system resilience.
Three quarters (74%) of consumers named “a reliable website or app” as the most important aspect of building trust in online experiences. That leaves no room for performance problems during busy sales seasons; customers rely on you no matter what.
High performance platform architecture
Our platform is built for performance. That means we constructed our systems to handle transaction loads significantly above our expected volumes for Single's Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. We test our systems to ensure they can process over 10 times our current peak transactions per second (TPS). Our processing infrastructure runs in the cloud, with elastic scaling capabilities that respond to any increases in load by automatically allocating more computing power as needed.
Specifically, we have invested in our platform resilience so we can accept fluctuations in traffic without concerns over stability. That’s how we maintain an average uptime of 99.999% – and many merchants achieve 100% uptime. Latency for card pay-in authorization is extremely low, enabling us to help you deliver super fast payments to your customers.
Load testing
We know how our system works under normal traffic patterns thanks to our system observability (more on that, below). But what happens if we need to process 20% more payments? Or 50% more? Or 100% more? We don’t just guess. We determine this by regularly putting our system under extreme load to see how it responds and ensure it can comfortably process significantly more payments than we currently process. As part of this, we operate an internal load and stress-testing platform to stay on top of our ability to serve traffic during peak moments, making use of industry-leading tooling such as K6. Our system capabilities are derived from experimentation and evidence, not guesswork.
Heightened change awareness
Performance is our priority, and while we continuously enhance our platform even during the holiday sales season, we have additional controls in place to ensure that every change is rigorously reviewed. Our engineers adhere to a heightened risk framework for change management over these periods, which includes safety controls such as heightened sign-off requirements and additional monitoring.
Fully tracked operations and fallback solutions
Given that we own so many stages of the payment lifecycle, it’s easier for us to track performance and pinpoint failures than other payment service providers (PSPs). While some PSPs can only monitor part of the picture, at Checkout.com, we can maintain oversight on the full span of payment operations. During peak season, that means we can provide more visibility into payment performance than our competitors.
We utilize industry-leading tooling to ensure that we can track the performance of every part of our system 24/7 – and this is no different during peak season. Key metrics include the volume of payments we process at any given time, the latency of requests sent between our internal systems, as well as the CPU, memory usage, and health of each service that works together to process your payments.
We use automated monitoring to ensure that every metric remains within tolerance, allowing us to react quickly to any concerning signals before they become significant problems. We also provide fallback solutions where necessary.
Our teams maintain close relationships with issuers, card networks (such as Visa and Mastercard), and other relevant third parties to ensure we’re aware of all necessary communications regarding performance. Keep an eye on your inbox for important updates regarding network protocols and compliance – our solutions engineering team is more than happy to help you figure out the next best steps.
Support when you need it
Our global teams are working overtime to ensure the best possible payment performance for you during busy seasons. You can rest assured that we have extra engineers on hand to provide support and ensure payments continue to run smoothly, regardless of the date or time.
For any further questions on your payments setup for peak season, reach out to your account manager.
If you need urgent support, visit our support site for instant chat 24/7 with an AI agent, and the option to raise a webform request for rapid escalation.
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