Holiday preparedness
Bazaarvoice is ready to help your e-commerce systems run smoothly during the peak holiday shopping season.
Use the information in this guide to ensure your user-generated content (UGC) program delivers the information your customers need to make informed holiday purchases.
Code freeze periods for 2024
Code freeze
November 9, 2024 12:01 AM CST through January 5, 2025 11:59 PM CST
During the code freeze, Bazaarvoice will:
- Maintain a 55-minute cache period for our edge network to optimize the hosted display and the Ratings & Reviews (Conversations) API.
- Not make changes to our products or any technology you depend on for integration, except to fix critical issues or make minor changes that do not impact your consumer site or mobile app experiences.
Minor changes that don’t impact your consumer site and mobile app experiences include changes to configuration settings, Workbench, Portal, or other applications.
Our normal release cadence will resume January 6, 2025 12:01 AM CST.
Deep freeze
- November 26, 2024 12:01 AM CST through December 2, 2024 11:59 PM CST
- December 21, 2024 12:01 AM CST through January 1, 2025 11:59 PM CST
During the deep freeze, Bazaarvoice will further lock down our systems and make only critical system changes. Critical system changes are infrastructure or configuration changes required to restore service or prevent service disruption.
The following image shows the correlation between API calls, product page views, and order count from July 2023 to January 2024 and how they spike during the holiday shopping season.
Holiday preparedness tasks
To prepare for the holiday season, review the following tasks and identify items that are relevant to you:
General
Hosted display for Ratings & Reviews and Questions & Answers
Ratings & Reviews (Conversations) API
To check your API data usage, open the Bazaarvoice Portal and go to Settings > API > API Analytics. During the holiday season (November and December), Bazaarvoice doubles the Conversations Display API and Product Recommendations API rate limit (from 3,000 to 6,000 requests per minute) by default. Read our Conversations API Terms of Use 
for more information. If you believe you will exceed the doubled limit, contact your Bazaarvoice representative or Support to request a temporary rate limit increase. If you do not contact Bazaarvoice and exceed your API call rate limit, your calls may be throttled to the defined limit.
Content Activation Solutions
Social Commerce
We encourage you to utilize your social and display features during the holiday season. However, we recommend that you do not make changes to your product catalog, analytics connections, or on-site code during the code freeze period listed above. Issues introduced or exposed by changes to these features may not be fixed until after the code freeze has been lifted. Bazaarvoice addresses critical issues immediately, but minor issues may not be addressed until after the end of the code freeze.
Contextual Commerce
affable.ai
Utilize our help resources as your prepare for the holiday season. For strategic advice, register for affable.ai office hours .
Product catalog updates
If you plan to update your product catalog, do so as soon as possible. Updates might include:
- Changes to the product hierarchy to align with preferred reporting at brand, category, or product levels
- Addition of new products or deletion of old ones
- Updates to the product information required for syndication including brand name, UPC, EAN, ISBN, product page URL, product image URL, or manufacturer part number
Updates through Portal
Use the Bazaarvoice Portal to quickly view and manage your product catalog. Common tasks include correcting errors that originate in your feed and adding missing product data.
Product feeds
If you provide product catalog data in a single feed file, send the updated feed to Bazaarvoice by October 31. We strongly recommend this for retail clients with large product catalogs.
We also recommend that you send updated feeds before the products are live on your website. This will allow us to set up syndication connections and ensure that all systems are properly indexed.
Large-scale product catalog changes
During the code freeze and deep freeze, Bazaarvoice will closely monitor all incoming product catalog feeds. If we detect large-scale changes in an incoming product catalog feed, we may pause its import if it could negatively impact overall system performance. We do this to ensure no degradation in the performance of the hosted display, API, and feed export systems. We will resume importing the feed when we determine it is appropriate to do so.
Brands syndicating to retailers
If you are a brand that syndicates content to retailers, ensure your retail channel partners have correct and complete product information.
Pre-holiday load and advance performance testing
Bazaarvoice proactively scales our systems to handle increased holiday traffic and leverages a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure optimal performance during periods of high demand. Because we serve many of the world’s largest retailers and brands, we add significant load capacity for the entire holiday season. Our capacity scaling strategy considers factors like network growth, online shopping popularity, and mobile shopping, based on historical data from the Bazaarvoice Network.
You must schedule load and performance tests at least three weeks in advance because of the stress that the holiday season puts on our systems. All requests will be assigned an available testing slot. Requests will be assigned a testing slot based on the order in which we receive them. Testing slots fill up quickly, so we can’t guarantee that you will receive a testing slot.
We do this because tests conducted outside of an approved testing slot may be negatively impacted when other tests are occurring at the same time, making the results invalid. Testing slots are limited. Contact Bazaarvoice Support as soon as possible to schedule load or performance testing of your systems that incorporate Bazaarvoice products. Depending on the scope of your agreement, service fees may apply. Contact your Client Success Director with any questions.
Security
The number of security attacks against online retailers peaks during the holiday season. Our priority is protecting you and your customers’ data while supporting safe and secure shopping. To prevent malicious activity, Bazaarvoice continuously monitors and blocks application layer attacks.
We will alert you to known security threats affecting Bazaarvoice systems through the system status notification system. Contact
Bazaarvoice Support
to report a security incident.
System status notifications
If you’re subscribed to Bazaarvoice system status notifications, we will send email and SMS alerts about incidents and security threats.
To receive email and SMS alerts about issues affecting Bazaarvoice systems, go to status.bazaarvoice.com and select Subscribe to updates.
Technical emergency contacts
Accurate contact information is crucial so we can reach you during the holiday season if we detect an issue. Contact Bazaarvoice Support to verify and update your technical emergency contacts. Your emergency contacts should include at least one person on call during the peak holiday season.
Contacting Bazaarvoice
With offices across the globe, the Bazaarvoice Support team has holiday schedules in place to ensure you have 24/7 coverage for critical issues. Bazaarvoice defines a critical issue as an outage impacting the following services:
- Submission or display in production
- Publication to social networks
- CAS, Social Commerce, or affable.ai dashboards
- Influenster app
Reaching out to Bazaarvoice Support directly is especially important during the holiday season because it’s the quickest way to resolve any issues you encounter.
Live chat
Available from the Support Community as the following times:
- 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM CST UTC-5 on regular US business days
- 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM GMT on regular UK business days
- 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM AEST on regular APAC business days
Telephone
Available 24/7 for critical issues. If your call is not answered, you must leave a voicemail with your name and phone number to ensure a return call. All other requests will be managed during regional business hours.
- Americas: 888-984-1381 (toll free) or 866-522-9227, option 4
- United Kingdom: 0800 368 0991 (toll free)
- France: 08 05 08 94 80 (toll free)
- Germany: 0800 188 8904 (toll free)
- EMEA (other than Germany): +44(0)20 8080 1100, option 4
- Australia: 1300-089-962 (toll free) or 02 9362 2200, option 4
- APAC (other than Australia): 061 2 9362 2200, option 4
Online
- Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal.
- On the Portal homepage, select Access the Support Community.
- Select Open a Case.
- From the drop-down menu, select Production Outage/Legal/Privacy Breach.
- File a case describing the details of the problem, steps to reproduce, and example links.
- Select Confirm.
- If available, attach a screenshot as a case comment.
You will receive an automated response to confirm receipt of your request. A service representative will respond to your case in accordance with the Service Level Objective (SLO). For more information on how to create a Support case, read our support article.
Common questions
We provide 24/7 coverage for outages and critical issues.
During the upcoming holiday season, a Support representative will respond to critical case submissions within one hour. To learn more about SLOs for the 2024 holiday season, refer to the Holiday 2024 Support Reference Guide .
Contact us by live chat or telephone, or open a support case. If you do not immediately reach someone by telephone, leave a message to ensure the most timely response. For more information, see Contacting Bazaarvoice.
Our moderation team is staffed to moderate your content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We carefully monitor the velocity of UGC submissions to maintain our authenticity standards and SLO attainment.
We will implement system changes with written confirmation from your authorized contacts. However, we will not make any system-wide changes during the holiday season. To learn more, see Code freeze.
Before the start of the holiday season, you should perform a health check of your Bazaarvoice components. It's important to check the integration and functionality of your submission form and display, and to verify your product feed, BV Pixel, and review requests.
Integration health offers helpful tips for identifying integration issues that impact the health of your implementation. If you have questions or need help preparing your site and product feed, you can start a live chat on
Support Community , call us, or open a support case.
Bazaarvoice will send email notifications about incidents and security threats through the system status notification system. To receive email and SMS alerts about issues affecting Bazaarvoice systems, go to status.bazaarvoice.com and select Subscribe to updates.
Resources
Bazaarvoice adds server and database resources in anticipation of increased system load during the holiday season. We monitor system performance, uptime, feed generation, and other critical systems, and scale them appropriately throughout this critical window.
During the holiday season (November and December), Bazaarvoice doubles the Conversations Display API and Product Recommendations API rate limit (from 3,000 to 6,000 requests per minute) by default. Read our Conversations API Terms of Use for more information.
Architecture
Bazaarvoice architecture provides scalability through the use of redundant and secure data centers. This infrastructure scales during peak demand and performs full failover in the event of a catastrophic event. Data is fully redundant through replication to multiple data centers. To further mitigate risk, we pre-scale our environment ahead of the holiday load profile.
Testing
Bazaarvoice conducts a high level of test automation, performing continuous integration testing as a best practice year-round. In addition, we execute a complete set of load and performance tests as well as disaster recovery scenarios and simulations to ensure all systems and personnel are prepared for any contingencies during the holiday season. Analysis of four years of previous holiday traffic has shown a predictable increase of approximately 2x the highest load average over the past ten months. Our preparedness and testing efforts are designed to ensure our systems are performing beyond the expected load profile.
During the holiday season (November and December), Bazaarvoice doubles the Conversations Display API and Product Recommendations API rate limit (from 3,000 to 6,000 requests per minute) by default. Read our Conversations API Terms of Use for more information. We don’t charge for this increase. However, if you exceed this doubled API call rate, Bazaarvoice reserves the right to charge fees for temporary rate limit increases. You may encounter service denials and “over quota” errors if you exceed the defined API call rate.
To avoid this, you can request a temporary rate limit increase before the holiday season by contacting your Bazaarvoice representative or Support. By planning this temporary increase in advance, Bazaarvoice will ensure that you will not encounter service interruptions.
