A brighter season for holiday order processing
Consumer shopping has been shifting from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to online retailers for years. But since the COVID-19 pandemic has been raging, that shift has accelerated dramatically. With millions of people staying safe at home rather than venturing downtown or to the mall, the online portion of total retail sales has increased 4.3%1 as of June 2020.
Jason Grenard, executive IT director for National Tree Company, was watching these trends. He saw the industry forecasts that online sales in the U.S. for the 2020 holiday season would grow at least 40% compared to 2019.2 It’s National Tree’s busiest time of the year, and Grenard knew the company had major challenges processing holiday orders in 2019 due to a slow order processing system running on aging hardware.