From Prime Day and Black Friday to surprise spikes: Why retailers are rethinking peak sales readiness

The reality, according to Mark Simon, vp of strategy at Celigo, the intelligent automation platform that unifies the predictable and the fully agentic, is that retailers are operating in a “post-digital” era. Customers expect to be able to shop across platforms and devices without glitches or interruptions. This shift means retailers cannot treat resilience as a seasonal initiative. It has to be built into everyday operations.

But still, many retailers have been unable to shake this outdated idea of peak sales events, which has led retailers to build their tech stacks with an eye on just surviving these peaks — and patching holes rather than taking a long-term approach to truly address problems in a retail infrastructure. The result is when a sales spike hits at a random time on the calendar, retailers’ tech stacks can fail because they lack an underlying platform that scales automatically.

“I call it the all-hands-on-deck approach. Everyone is doing a superhuman effort, so to speak, to get through it,” Simon said. “It wasn’t sustainable when it happened once a year. But if it happens five, six, 10, 11, 12 times a year — now, it’s great for business — but things crumble when you have to rely on that approach.”

In this way, true peak sales readiness for retailers isn’t about bracing for impact. Rather, it’s about building an always-on tech infrastructure with the ability to scale — allowing retailers to focus on the customer experience rather than putting out fires on the back end of their operations.

For Simon, this means reframing peak sales readiness as simply growth readiness, which starts with an automation-first approach that pulls from AI.

Retailers and brands who focus on growth readiness are “taking this approach from the beginning — automation first,” Simon said. “And they’re using that operational excellence to drive customer experience.”

The problem with the patchwork approach

Many retailers and brands rely on point-to-point integrations (like a direct plug from an e-commerce platform to a third-party logistics provider, for example) that work fine when processing 100 orders, but can’t handle a spike of 10,000 orders. This reliance on such integrations creates a tech stack built on different systems that are layered, one on top of another, to handle that outdated view of peak sales. These fragile tech stacks are costly for retailers in several different ways.

First, inventory can become unreliable. When retailers’ systems can’t sync in real time, it becomes much more likely that they oversell products, which is detrimental to the customer experience.

Another cost is customer support overload. When different retail systems can’t communicate with each other, information can get stuck. For example, warehouse data that can’t make it to a customer-facing app might result in a disappointed shopper when they don’t find out until the day of expected delivery that there’s been a delay in receiving their purchase. The result? An overwhelming flood of customer support tickets.

“You can’t rely on the old way — a very reactive way,” Simon said. “As companies evolve and start taking what we think of as more of this automation-first approach, they modernize their infrastructure, they become more agile.”

The solution for today’s retailers and brands is to look at an intelligent automation platform as a type of central nervous system for their tech stack — one that can move data and optimize business practices by applying logic and handling errors. For instance, if an order fails, systems governed by an intelligent automation platform would catch the error and retry the order, rather than requiring a human to manually fix the problem.

“Leading companies are tying their systems together, getting high-quality, accurate data, and using AI to drive meaningful insights from it,” Simon said. “Where it can drive action — whether it’s internally to drive actions and recommend improvements to customer experience or getting it in the hands of the platform to drive and create that level of excellence with the customer.”

Taking an automation-first, AI-based approach to growth readiness

Simon said there are several common bottlenecks that can get in the way of retailers who are looking to set themselves up for growth readiness.

For example, he pointed to layering different cloud-oriented tools on top of each other within retail infrastructure, creating bottlenecks at volume.

Another example is retailers whose order pipelines don’t match up with the systems that are responsible for fulfillment, which results in backlogged orders and delivery delays when there’s a sales spike, which directly impacts customer experience and expectations.

The crux of the issue, Simon said, is the gap between what many retailers consider automation and what automation actually requires in an increasingly AI-centric model. Many retailers have added automation in layers over time and assume that means their operations are fully automated. In reality, patching together disconnected processes does not deliver governed, integrated automation. True readiness depends on a governed integration platform that connects systems in a controlled, scalable way and sets the foundation for growth.

“A good AI strategy is founded in a good data and process automation strategy. They’re linked. And you have to build your way there,” Simon said. “Treat data as your foundation, and then these things become much easier and then the initiatives become successful. That’s the key.”

A tech stack that operates around an intelligent automation platform gives brands and retailers the governance they need to ensure AI tools function properly for them. This is because it gives AI clean and accurate real-time data on which to base its decisions.

“It takes effort and a dedicated strategy with the right platform to create the foundation that both current and future AI solutions need for success,” Simon said.

Peak sales readiness as growth readiness

Wellness technology brand Therabody provides a good example of what this modern automation approach to growth readiness looks like in real life.

As one of North America’s fastest-growing companies, Therabody quickly ran into infrastructure challenges as sales accelerated. To keep pace, the company took a phased approach to implementing Celigo across the business. That shift allowed the team to move from reacting to rapid growth to building systems that could absorb volume without strain.

For Therabody, that meant automating critical workflows, eliminating manual order processing during peaks, enabling business users to build and manage integrations, and creating a scalable integration foundation to support continued revenue growth.

The lesson for brands and retailers is straightforward. Peak sales readiness is not a seasonal tactic. It is a long-term commitment to growth readiness.

“The most important thing they should do right now is commit to thinking about it differently, to just asking critical questions,” Simon said. “It’s adopting this mentality of, ‘OK, where can we improve processes? Where are we touching things manually? Where’s the experience breaking for customers?'”

Assessing whether retailers and brands have successfully shifted their mindset from peak-sales readiness to growth readiness comes down to asking a simple question, Simon said.

“Ask the teams that are owning the operational processes, that are owning the technology stack … a question: ‘We’re going to have this peak event in six weeks or eight weeks, whatever it may be. What’s the reaction to that?'” he advised. “And you know you’re on the right track and you know you are where you should be when the team says, ‘Oh, it’s not a big deal. We’ve got it handled.'”

Sponsored by Celigo