Global load, zero noise: Black Friday on Commerce Layer.
Commerce Layer saw 260% YoY order growth and globally distributed traffic — yet Black Friday stayed fast, stable, and uneventful, proving the platform’s real-world scalability.
Black Friday is a great way of depicting whether a brand’s commerce infrastructure is genuinely scalable or simply optimistic. This year, across all merchants running on Commerce Layer, the results were clear: strong growth & stable performance resulting in a surprisingly uneventful week from a technical standpoint, which, in our world, is the best possible outcome.
Global and distributed Black Friday
Black Friday is increasingly an international event, and this year made that even clearer. Retailers saw substantial growth in activity outside traditional markets, with cross-border orders up 34% compared to last year.
Traffic distribution also shifted: regions that historically saw moderate engagement recorded noticeable spikes, while established markets continued to grow steadily. Commerce Layer’s globally distributed API infrastructure handled this shift without any regional imbalance. Any latency remained low and consistent across all major geographies.
Full week of volume
Black Friday has steadily evolved from a single peak moment into a prolonged commercial week. This year, total order volume for the week increased by 235%, with traffic ramping earlier than ever. Many merchants started promotions as early as Monday, and conversion rates remained strong across the full seven-day period.
Sustaining elevated load for multiple days requires elasticity that goes beyond "handling the spike." Throughout the week, our system scaled automatically, absorbing concurrency surges with stable response times and zero incidents. Engineering teams didn’t need war rooms or the need to intervene at all.
Composable architecture under pressure
Black Friday is a reliable test of architectural rigor, and this year reaffirmed why composable commerce continues to gain traction. Independent services for pricing, inventory, promotions, and checkout scaled proportionally based on demand patterns. There were no shared bottlenecks or cascading failures.