From Black Friday through Cyber Monday (BFCM), Stripe processed more than 300 million transactions with “a total payment volume of more than $18.6 billion.”
It was reportedly the “largest ever” four-day period on Stripe.
A Stripe public microsite “tracked these and a dozen other BFCM metrics in real-time, including the uptime of the Stripe API.” During this period of intense activity, the Stripe API maintained availability greater than 99.999%, “with a peak of 27,395 requests per second.”
The term Black Friday was coined in Philadelphia in the 1960s, “to characterize the way physical infrastructure struggled under heightened volume as crowds surged downtown at the start of the Christmas season.”
The way people shop has changed a lot since then. Today, nearly half of all shopping around the weekend after Thanksgiving “takes place online, which is why since 2005, the period has been known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But the holiday spending spree is still an infrastructure test—though now of digital financial infrastructure as much as physical roads and stores.”
This BFCM, Stripe handled a peak volume “of 93,304 transactions per minute, while maintaining API uptime greater than 99.999%.”
This level of reliability ensured “that large companies such as Amazon, Shopify, Lightspeed, and Squarespace maximized their revenue potential during the most active shopping days of the year.”
Farhan Thawar, VP of engineering at Shopify, said:
“Black Friday-Cyber Monday is the busiest moment of the year for Shopify merchants, and Stripe’s industry-leading uptime and performance helped ensure millions of successful transactions.”
While BFCM originated in the US, it’s gone global.
Over the past weekend, Stripe processed “more than one billion each in GBP, EUR, CAD, and AUD denominated transactions, and facilitated purchases in 185 countries. The top cross-currency purchasing routes were Americans buying from Canadian merchants and British consumers shopping with businesses in the eurozone.”
Edward Whatmore, chief digital officer at Mountain Warehouse, a UK-based company and one of the world’s largest sellers of outdoors equipment, said:
“Black Friday can be a really stressful, high-pressure period for us. To have a stable platform with a high rate of uptime is key, so fortunately we were able to switch to Stripe and push all of our traffic through the platform. With Stripe, we don’t have to worry about reliability. We can rest easy knowing our platform is going to have greater than 99.999% uptime.”
BFCM transaction volume on Stripe has “increased more than 300x over the last ten years. The Stripe BFCM dashboard tracked the record-setting volume in real-time, along with metrics for a range of Stripe products.”
In total, during BFCM:
More than 5.4 million subscriptions were “created with Stripe Billing.”
That’s more than one subscription “for every citizen in Ireland, and means that many businesses on Stripe will benefit from recurring subscription revenue long after BFCM is over.”
More than 250,000 Stripe Climate contributions were made. These donations will “directly support carbon removal from the atmosphere.”
More than 530,000 minutes (equal to more than a full year) of checkout time “was saved with Link, Stripe’s one-click checkout.”
Over 16.7 million fraudulent transaction attempts “were prevented with Stripe Radar.”