Holidays 2025: retailers face a perfect storm of traffic, threats, and customer pressure

For retailers, the holiday season continues to be the biggest, most unforgiving moment in the calendar.

It’s the period that often determines whether the year ends in profit and the one moment when any weakness in performance, security, or customer experience is ruthlessly exposed.

The fundamentals haven’t changed, but the dynamics shaping them have.

Global ecommerce sales surged to $1.2 trillion in 2024, with nearly 70% of all online purchases occurring on mobile devices. This shift has made speed, resilience, and low latency non-negotiable. In an era where shoppers browse during their commute, while queuing, or from the sofa, even a slight delay can send them to a rival.

Cloudflare’s own network saw 405 billion requests to ecommerce sites during Black Friday 2024, representing a 50% jump week over week and demonstrating just how extreme seasonal spikes have become.

And while Black Friday has passed peak demand didn’t simply spike – it stretched. Discount windows are longer, traffic surges are more erratic, and digital pressure runs deeper into December. With demand expected to remain high and volatile through the festive period, the margin for error has never been smaller.

AI-Driven attacks are redefining the threat landscape

Retailers have long planned for traffic surges, but the threat landscape has shifted even faster. Cybercriminals are moving at a greater scale, with AI making attacks more convincing, more targeted, and more automated.

Deepfake-enabled phishing can convincingly impersonate executives or suppliers and trigger credential theft or fraudulent payments. We’re also seeing phishing campaigns that adapt in real time to specific employees and roles – using familiar language, timing and internal context to look routine during peak weeks.

At the same time, autonomous ransomware tools can scan, infiltrate, and encrypt systems rapidly, overwhelming legacy defenses that rely on patchworks of point solutions.

Bots are evolving too. What looks like shopper traffic can hide credential stuffing attempts, loyalty point theft, or scraping campaigns designed to undercut pricing. During the holidays, elevated legitimate traffic makes malicious automation harder to detect , raising the risk of fraud without disrupting real customers.

When customer expectations rise, teams feel the strain

Customers now moving seamlessly between channels – browsing on mobile, researching on desktop, and completing purchases in-store or via apps. They expect a consistent, fast experience with personalized recommendations and frictionless checkout, regardless of device or location.

But budgets haven’t grown at the same pace. Many retailers are operating with leaner teams and tighter spending while still being asked to innovate, secure, and scale. That convergence of limited resources, surging demand, and smarter threats creates real operational strain.

Processes that worked five years ago no longer hold up under today’s ecommerce scale, making automation and consolidation essential to keep up.

A unified cloud platform cuts through complexity

This is where simplification is becoming a strategic advantage. Rather than expanding toolkits, more retailers are shifting toward unified, cloud-native connectivity platforms that combine performance, security, and developer capabilities in one environment.

Large distributed networks can absorb terabit-scale DDoS attacks, while cloud mitigation filters traffic before it reaches the core infrastructure. Advanced bot management uses behavioral analysis and machine learning to stop scraping and automated fraud without resorting to CAPTCHAs that frustrate shoppers.

Zero trust security models, multi-factor authentication, and stronger email protection reduce ransomware risk at their point of entry, limiting lateral movement if devices or credentials are compromised.

Meanwhile, end-to-end encryption, client-side protection, and real-time data loss prevention safeguard customer data and support PCI DSS compliance during high-transaction periods.

Customer experience still determines who wins peak season

Security and performance are one half the equation. The other half is delivering excellent customer experiences, even under heavy load. Customers expect instant page loads, flexible payments, reliable loyalty programs, and apps that never go down.

Meeting that standard requires infrastructure that scales automatically, in addition to developer tools that enable rapid feature delivery, safe testing, and quick rollouts without risking downtime.

API-first architecture helps retailers connect inventory, checkout, fulfilment, recommendations, and loyalty data into a seamless omnichannel experience. But APIs have become a major attack vector, so they must be secured throughout their lifecycle.

Winning the holiday season starts with simplifying the stack

During the 2025 holiday season, the mix of rising traffic, intelligent threats, and heightened customer expectations makes complexity a liability. Fragmented systems slow teams down, create misconfiguration risk, and reduce agility at the worst possible time.

Retailers that consolidate performance, security, and developer environments will reduce operational overhead, respond faster to incidents, and ship improvements safely. Most importantly, they create a resilient foundation that supports both innovation and protection during the busiest weeks of the year.

Peak trading no longer fits neatly into a single month. Retailers that modernize now will be the ones that capture demand, protect revenue, and deliver the fast, trusted experiences that define long-term loyalty.

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