This is the one time during the year that online retailers need to ensure preparedness for the onslaught of holiday shoppers and it seems as though many businesses may have dropped the ball. “Black Friday”, one of the busiest shopping days of the season, and the thirty days leading up to this day were heavy monitored by Uptrends, a remote-intelligence performance monitoring service. The results put out by this web site monitoring company showed that many retail companies with sites online were less than prepared overall.
Companies monitored
Uptrends monitored one hundred of the more popular e-retailers throughout the month of November, up to and including “Black Friday.” Of those companies monitored, a few came out on top with numerous page errors and long periods of down-time.
The biggest loser out of those monitored was Crutchfield Corporation, an electronics specialty retailer, with a total of sixty-one page errors and over five hours of web site down-time. Following not too far behind was home electronics biggie, Fry’s. This store managed to build up a total of forty-three page errors and over three and half hours of totaled down-time.
Out of all one hundred of the monitored web sites, nearly half experienced some amount of down-time. Fifty-five were able to maintain a 100% up-time, twenty-four came in at 99.9% and twenty-one sported a 99.6% up-time. Anything lower than 99.6% results in over three and a half hours of down-time in a thirty day period.
Of growing concern is that many of the companies monitored are considered to be household names. The online public demographic is the same as the general public when it comes to shopping both online and off. These shoppers expect a certain level of reliability of those in the retail business who have been around for quite some time.
Other affected web sites
It seems as though those companies monitored by Uptrend weren’t the only ones affected by the “Black Friday” holiday shopping rush. Department store Sears’ online web site experienced multiple and total site crashes throughout the day. Walmart, Kmart, Amazon, Target and Costco all experience significant web site slowdowns or other internet issues.
According to StorefrontBacktalk, numerous large and well-known retailers were affected in one way or another with the influx of shoppers on “Black Friday”. Even non-retail product providers were showing as having issues. Hallmark.com, while stating its web site issues were attributed to improvements, greeted customers with an unavailable message on this day.
Growing market
With more and more retailers joining the online retail crowd, it seems to be a growing concern over whether or not companies are putting in the time and research to improve upon overall reliability. Day to day operations of an online retail store is not the proper litmus test for reliability. It is days like “Black Friday” that should be the standard setters. Perhaps the issues that cropped up on this traditional holiday shopping day should be assessed and scrutinized to better prepare e-retailers for next year’s holiday shopping menagerie.
December 12th, 2009 at 9:01 am
thanks for performance admin
January 14th, 2010 at 12:25 am
This is an epic article, I’ll definitely be adding your blog to my list.