Contentful powers biggest shopping events of 2024: Billions of API calls on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

It’s officially official. Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024 shattered all previous records for online shopping activity, according to Salesforce. And who helped to power those lightning-fast product pages and smooth checkouts? That’s correct: Contentful.

Our Content Delivery APIs handled an astronomical 3.21 billion requests across the retail category on Black Friday 2024, a 39% jump from last year.

As for Cyber Monday? Hold onto your (new) hat (which you bought for an irresistible discount): 3.06 billion delivery requests across the retail category, surging 50% year-on-year.

To put things into perspective, we usually serve “only” 1 billion API calls on an average day.

But these aren't just vanity metrics. Every API call represents a shopper finding the perfect gift, a retailer exceeding sales goals, a brand building lasting customer relationships. That's the power of Contentful. As the leading composable content platform, we give businesses the agility to create exceptional digital experiences that convert shoppers into loyal customers.

Ready to see how the world's top brands used Contentful to conquer the holiday shopping season? Keep reading to discover insights and strategies you can use to elevate your online performance.

APIs: The unsung heroes of ecommerce

You may not know it, but APIs (application programming interfaces) are the invisible force behind much of what you do online. When you check flight availability, order food delivery, or buy something online, you're largely interacting with APIs.

In the world of ecommerce, APIs are essential for everything from managing inventory and processing payments, to tracking orders and providing customer support. They allow different systems to communicate with each other, creating a smooth and efficient shopping experience.

The Contentful API ecosystem plays an integral part, too. With dedicated APIs for content management, delivery, images, and previews, our users have complete control over how their content is deployed and connected within their technology stack. 

Customers love our API ecosystem because it’s proven to be robust, reliable, scalable, and fast. This makes us a reliable partner for effectively managing high-trafficked shopping events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. 

API calls = delivery requests

So, what exactly do we mean when we talk about API calls? We frame API calls within the context of delivery requests. 

A delivery request refers specifically to the Content Delivery API — an API call where a consumer interacts with a brand’s content.

“Delivery” refers to a piece of content housed on the Contentful server that’s delivered to apps, websites, and other media channels.

For example, when a consumer takes an action like clicking on a banner at the top of a retailer's home page and they’re directed to a new page.

The numbers: 2024 vs. 2023 vs. 2022

This year's Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend saw an unprecedented surge in API traffic. We’re talking BIG numbers. The biggest yet. 

• On Black Friday 2024, we supported 3.21 billion delivery requests across the retail category, a significant increase from 2.31 billion delivery requests in 2023 and 1.7 billion delivery requests in 2022. 

• On Cyber Monday 2024, we supported 3.06 billion delivery requests across the retail category, a massive increase from 2.03 billion delivery requests in 2023 and 1.53 billion delivery requests in 2022. 

Numbers this large might be difficult to process, so let’s put them into context: On an average day, Contentful supports around 1 billion API calls. This figure grows substantially on peak shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday — this year it was over three times as much as on a typical day!

Another important datapoint is uptime. For these pivotal days, we provided 99.99% uptime for retail customers on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024.

So, what’s the takeaway? This remarkable year-on-year growth demonstrates the unstoppable rise of ecommerce each holiday season, and the confidence our customers and partners have that Contentful will power their peak seasons, reliably and securely every time. 

Scaling to meet demand

To handle this massive surge in API traffic, we leverage a robust and scalable infrastructure. Our engineering team works tirelessly to optimize our systems to ensure high availability, low latency, and real-time data processing, ensuring that our APIs remain responsive and reliable even under extreme load.

You can read more about it in this post, where one of our engineers wrote about four of the principles we apply at Contentful to maintain a lean delivery machine, and consistently make good on the services our customers rely upon. These rules aren’t just timely for seasonal shopping events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but appropriate to maintain high performance all year round. 

Plus, from listening to our customers and their growing need to store data in the European Union, we’ve also broadened our global footprint with EU data residency. This maintains our high-quality standards for scalability and reliability regardless of whether our customers are in the U.S. or Europe, as their needs evolve over time.

APIs powering dynamic ecommerce

The ecommerce landscape is dynamic and constantly evolving, and APIs will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping its future. More and more enterprises are embracing composable commerce, omnichannel experiences, and personalized shopping journeys, all of which rely heavily on APIs.

Don’t take my word for it. According to Laura Mason, Head of Digital Product at On: “Our vision was to thread brand and editorial content into the commerce journeys to contextualize our products and allow customers to get to know and love our brand.” You can read the full case study here.

At Contentful, we remain committed to staying ahead of the curve and providing our customers with the most innovative solutions to power their ecommerce success. Our recent acquisition of Ninetailed, a pioneer of content personalization and experimentation, gives Contentful customers even more opportunities to create seamless and dynamic customer interactions that generate revenue.

The bottom line

Once again, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024 demonstrate the critical role APIs play in enabling a smooth and enjoyable online shopping experience.

Everyone at Contentful is proud to play their part in this holiday season, and we look forward to continuing to support the evolving needs of our partners and their customers. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to do some shopping for my Secret Santa.

Footnote

These data points reflect the total number of successful delivery calls indexed as of Wednesday 4 December 2024. 

We’re presenting the numbers a little differently from previous years. We’re narrowing the focus to only those API calls made by our customers in the retail category.

In this way, the data is crisper and more relevant to the seasonal events we’re all preoccupied with. For example, is it still acceptable to give socks as a present in 2024? (Editor’s note: Yes.)

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