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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 theres 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. A faster, more resilient storefront doesnt just feel smoother. It directly drives higher conversion rates, greater cart completion, and improved ROI on every marketing dollar. Research shows that 63% of shoppers abandon a page that takes longer than four seconds to load, and shaving even one second off load time can lift mobile conversions by 3%. Thats not just a technical winits a financial one. When ad costs are rising, supply chains are fragile, and budgets are tight, squeezing more value out of the traffic you already have is one of the most dependable levers retailers can pull. The companies that win in 2025 will be those that recognize speed and stability not as a side project but as a boardroom priority. Assumption 2: Shoppers Are Only Human This holiday season has a twist: not every shopper will be human. 2025 will be the first year of Cyborg Monday. AI agents are already comparing prices, summarizing reviews, and recommending products. They do not get tired, they do not impulse-buy, and they have little patience for heavy pages or unstable components. Just as SEO reshaped how teams built for Google, the rise of AI answers and generative engine optimization (GEO) is pushing a new discipline that favors clean markup, predictable rendering, and fast pages so experiences are easy for humans and machines to understand. Recently, I wanted to find a kid-friendly music player with streaming capabilities. I did not start with a traditional search engine. Instead, I asked an AI. In seconds it produced options, pulled in reviews, and linked to retailers. In that moment, the agent was the primary shopper. Multiply that instinct across millions of households this holiday season, and you can see why 2025 will be different. Retailers arent just competing for human clicks anymore. Theyre competing for placement in AI-generated answers, shopping summaries, and bot-driven carts. Thats why performance readiness is about more than keeping the lights on. Its about ensuring your site is fast, resilient, and discoverable, whether the shopper is a person on a smartphone or an AI agent buying on their behalf. Assumption 3: More Traffic Equals More Revenue In uncertain economic times, the reflex is to double down on traffic acquisition. Retailers pour money into ads, believing more visitors will guarantee growth. But the assumption that volume alone drives revenue is increasingly flawed. When load times lag or pages break, additional visitors do not translate into additional sales. Instead, they magnify losses. Every click that doesnt convert represents wasted spend. Buying more top-of-funnel only works if your experience converts reliably under pressure. Under peak load, third-party tools can stall or fail. Without orchestration, you pay for clicks that never become customers. The smarter bet is to extract more value from the traffic you already have by raising conversion, reducing abandonment, and protecting every paid visit with speed and stability. The Imperative: Build for Speed and Agility Recognizing flawed assumptions is only the beginning. Most teams dont lose sales because they lack a strategy; they lose them because theyre weighed down by fragility. Modern e-commerce storefronts are like orchestrasdozens of third-party vendors, from ratings and reviews to personalization engines, all playing at once. But under the heavy traffic of peak shopping season, many of those instruments stall, fall out of sync, or fail to load entirely. Performance readiness in 2025 means more than checking a Lighthouse score. It means building agility into the stack itself: Continuous optimization, not one-time fixes. Performance isnt static. Codebases evolve, vendors push updates, and new scripts pile up. Optimization must be ongoing. Real-time resilience under load. Peak traffic reveals fragility. Stress-testing and load resilience need to be continuous capabilities, not seasonal exercises. Orchestrate third parties and dont blindly trust them. Every vendor integration affects performance. Leaders must demand visibility and orchestration across the stack. Tie visibility to revenue. Technical scores are helpful, but what matters is the financial translation: how many sales are lost or gained through performance. The Bottom Line Holiday pressure is coming. You cant control tariffs, shipping costs, or consumer sentiment. You can control what happens when shoppers or their agents hit your site. The first Cyborg Monday will not reward those with the loudest promotions or the biggest ad budgets. It will reward those who have built fast, resilient, bot-friendly storefronts. In this new era of e-commerce, milliseconds wont just decide whether you win or lose a customer. They will decide whether you appear in the consideration set at all.
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E-Commerce
Miklu Silvanto, Ouras chief design officer, says incorporating advanced computing power into a tiny ring is a major challenge. It’s just as challenging to make a ring that people will actually want to wear around the clock. So Silvanto, an industrial design veteran who has worked at Apple and Bang & Olufsen, must also think of himself as a jewelry designer. “A ring is such an intimate object,” he says. “You might wear it alongside your wedding ring. You need to think comfort, and beauty, and fashion.” On October 1, Oura launches a new collection of ceramic rings that are more fashion-forward than its previous ones, which resemble metallic wedding bands. Since ceramic takes well to color, the new rings come in an array of hues, including petal pink, tide green, cloud white, and midnight blue. The company has also developed a new charging system that will allow wearers to switch between rings seamlessly, without losing any data. [Image: Oura] These new rings cost $499, while the metallic versions are priced between $350 and $500 depending on the finish. Users must also pay $70 annually to use the app that presents their health data, analysis, and advice. Given how expensive this product is, the idea of switching rings based on your outfit of the day may be an affordable reality to only a small, wealthy slice of the population, epitomized by some of the most famous Oura wearersMark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian, Prince Harry, and Gwyneth Paltrow, to name a few. Still, the rings are resonating with consumers around the world. Oura sold 2.5 million rings last year, making up half of its total sales since 2015. And the company expects to generate $1 billion in sales this year, making it one of the biggest players in the wearable technology industry. After its $825 million Series E round, its now valued at $11 billion. [Photo: Oura] The Tiniest Computer For a designer like Silvanto, working on a smart ring involves incorporating as much technology as possible into the tiniest of products. When Oura launched a decade ago as a Kickstarter project, its first ring was much chunkier and could monitor only sleep and daily activity. [Image: Oura] Since then, the Oura’s designers have managed to make the ring smaller. Both the metal rings and the new ceramic ones are roughly 8 millimeters wide, 2 millimeters thick, and weigh between 5 and 8 grams depending on the size. And the rings are able to track around 50 biometrics. To do this, they use several sensors, including an infrared LED that measures blood oxygen levels, green and infrared PPG (photoplethysmogram) sensors that track heart rate, a digital thermometer that measures body temperature, and a sensitive accelerometer that tracks movement. Oura has benefited from broader changes in the technology industry that has been working toward miniaturization. (This is similar to what has been happening at, say, Dyson, which is incorporating more and more powerful motors into smaller hairdryers and vacuums.) [Photo: Oura] Silvanto says Oura has focused on incorporating this tech into a design that is as comfortable and beautiful as possible. The new rings are made from zirconia ceramic, which is significantly harder and more durable than the ceramic used for vases and dishware. The rings are shaped and then fired in a kiln, which chemically transforms them into the harder material. (In fact, it is so hard that it can scuff softer metals.) Silvanto stresses the appeal of the materials ability to take on colors. The four hues in the new collection are glossy and vibrant. If Oura’s metallic rings look like simple wedding bands, these ceramic rings evoke the color of gemstones. It’s jewelry that allows users to express their tastes and aesthetic preferences. [Photo: Oura] Oura ring as fashion object Now that Oura is framing its rings as fashion objects, it wanted to ensure users were able to easily swap them on a daily basis to go with their various styles or moods. Silvanto says creating a system that would allow users to change rings while keeping all their data intact wasn’t simple. Data is stored in the ring itself, in the app, and in the cloud. “When a user switches between rings, all of this data needs to be synchronized to ensure that the tracking would be accurate,” he says. (This new data-synching capability is live on iOS apps today and will be available on Android starting October 10.) While the new ceramic designs are a significant launch for Oura, Silvanto says his team is already focused on dreaming up the companys next-gen rings. As sensor technology continues to shrink, rings will become even thinner. And the team will continue to work on making them as stylish and fashin-forward as possible. “The best ring is one that people actually want to wear,” Silvanto says. “And to do that, you need to think beyond technology and about culture.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Peloton is pushing off with a new strategy for making workouts personal and more useful. The at-home fitness company today unveiled a turnaround strategy that it says will overhaul and improve its offerings by relying on AI-powered features. The companys ultimate goal? Leveraging technology to increase personalization and create a more sticky workout experience and prevent churn, create communities between members that will bind them to the program. The new strategy comes after a rocky few years for the company. Peloton went public in 2019 at a price of $27 per share, but is now trading at $9 after incorrectly predicting demand for its products after a COVID-19-fueled surge drove the price to a height of $167.42 in January 2021. In an August earnings call, CEO Peter Sternan Apple Fitness+ cofounder who joined Peloton in Januaaryannounced a 6% workforce reduction. On the same calll, the company posted a fourth-quarter profit and signaled it would adjust prices to offset the impact of extra costs associated with tariffs. Some of those price adjustments were announced today; the companys All-Access Membership from $44 to $49.99 and App+ Membership from $24 to $28.99, and App One Membership from $12.99 to $15.99 effective this month. With todays announcement, the company is banking on AI-powered workout advice, personalization, and more community-focused content that will restore its usership (and stock price) back to its pandemic height. AI Integration Pelotons newest features involve AI integration to personalize users experiences. Today, the company launched Peloton IQ, an AI and computer vision system available on its new product models to provide personalized guidance and class recommendations for members, based on movement tracking via built-in cameras, class history, and fitness level. To power Peloton IQ, the company built its own large language model (LLM) using the data its collected over time. “We’re not using off the shelf LLMs, Pelotons Chief Product Officer Nick Caldwell says. No else on the planet has the ability to do the sort of movement tracking that you’re going to see in our products. For some aspects of the product the company is using other LLMs like Metas Llama. To match the companys new AI capabilities, Peloton also unveiled new base and premium equipment. Its new bikes, treadmills, and rowing machines have built-in cameras that track users movements and offer them real-time feedback on their form during strength workouts. The cameras can also track weight-lifting reps and suggest different weights for each exercise. The new equipment also has swiveling screens to make cross-training in view of the camera easier. Getting Personal The upgraded software also includes a workout generator which comes up with personalized workout plans based on a users goals (like getting stronger or losing weight), and a self-paced strength setting that lets members take on-demand classes at their own pace while they receive live feedback from Peloton IQ. The equipment can be integrated with fitness trackers including products from Apple, Fitbit, and Garmin. Once Pelotons products have registered a users goals, workout history, and data, the app can even rate classes for them. For example, a member might see a harder than your usual tag next to a class while they are browsing. At the end of the class we can look at how you performed and we can give you insights, says Jen Kotter, Pelotons chief content officer. Every week we roll that up into a report that is meant to directly affect the actions that you take on our platform. To prepare for the launch, the company has already banked 2,000 instructor-led classes that can track usersall available on the platform starting today. Custom workouts for more people As Peloton uses AI to expand its personalization capabilities, its also unveiling tailored content for different groups of users, including one that has been the target of a growing focus from companies: people in menopause. In 2024 the market for menopause-related products and services was worth approximately $17.79 billion. By 2030, that number is projected to reach around $24.35 billion. Today the company announced a partnership with Respin Health, which provides coaching, community support, andproducts geared towards women in menopause. The programming, set to launch October 6, will feature curated classes designed to relieve certain menopause symptoms, and will let women join a dedicated digital community on the Peloton app. Kotter says its an example of Peloton listening to what its ridersand instructorswant from it. [Menopause] started to be a big conversation for a lot of members who had been with us for many years, she says. They didn’t like the way they were feeling, and they honestly didn’t know what kind of workouts would help them and they didn’t want to lose traction. The company is also launching other dedicated content collections to help groups including those with runners knees or tennis elbows, new moms, and office workers. In tandem, Peloton is doubling down on digital teams in the app, letting users join them based on various affinities or hobbies to encourage each other, all in the hopes of getting them to stay. Ultimately, we want to be able to have a one-to-one relationship with each one of those 6 million [members],” Caldwell says.
Category:
E-Commerce
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