TLDR: A look at some Gadget stats from the 2024 BFCM weekend.

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Well folks, we did it. BFCM 2024 was another record-breaking year for the Shopify community, and we want to say congratulations to all of the Shopify developers and agencies on making it through!

Now that things have settled down and we've all had a moment to breathe, let's appreciate how much Shopify agencies and developers have built over the last few months. This BFCM, Gadget apps processed a record number of Shopify webhooks and the platform saw its highest usage ever! So we’re here to share some of that record-breaking traffic data and see just how much you all processed compared to the previous week and month.

Let’s start with webhooks! Gadget processed a total of 89,406,843 Shopify webhooks over the BFCM weekend:

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It was a strong kickoff to the weekend, with a massive spike throughout Black Friday! Traffic over the weekend and Cyber Monday was largely the same compared to the previous week. (This author is curious to know what Shopify’s total traffic looked like over the BFCM weekend to see if this pattern is Gadget-specific or a reflection of overall BFCM traffic). 

Taking a closer look at the total webhook numbers from Black Friday, we can see an increase to over 21,000 webhooks processed per minute, up from about 13,000 the previous Friday, with a peak of over 34,000 webhooks handled per minute!

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Most of us have heard the discourse around how BFCM seems to start earlier and earlier every year. So, let’s take a look back at the previous month to see if this trend may have had any effect on such a major traffic spike. Comparing our webhooks to 30 days before the BFCM weekend started, we can see an even bigger difference — that average of 21,000 webhooks processed per minute is now compared to an average of 8,000 in October.

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That’s far from nothing. In fact, during Black Friday, Gadget was processing 1 out of every 700 Shopify webhooks, earning a shoutout from people on the Shopify team.

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Dive into orders

Focusing in on <inline-code>orders/create<inline-code> webhooks, we can see that 1,982,513 orders were processed by Gadget apps over the weekend:

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This is a 2.5X increase in the number of <inline-code>orders/create<inline-code> webhooks handled compared to the previous Friday, similar to the rise in total webhook traffic over the weekend.

Some other stats

Gadget also handled a total of:

• 3 billion reads
• 700 million writes
• 97 million background actions enqueued and run

All of your hard work has resulted in all of these record numbers for Gadget over 4 days.

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Congratulations again to all ecommerce developers for surviving another BFCM weekend. The Gadget infrastructure team spent months preparing for this weekend to ensure all of your apps could reliably serve your Shopify clients and their customers. We managed to successfully scale up platform resources so you didn’t need to. Now, it’s time for everyone to take a well-deserved nap.

We look forward to doing it again next year. Happy coding!