Crashing Websites? Is this 1999 again?

Pfreemanevans | December 07, 2006, 09:23 PM

Since Thanksgiving, Overstock.com, Macys.com, Wal-Mart.com, cybermonday.com and Amazon.com, to name a few biggies have all had site slowdown issues. One would think that after 10 years of online selling retailers could plan for the traffic they are getting even at peak times. Well, in fact retailers are planning for these spikes in traffic. The problem is that no CFO or CEO of an Internet business would rightly allow a relatively mature online retailer to plan for an eight-fold increase in traffic. The response to the door-buster promotions online retailers are promoting this year, many for the first time, has been extraordinary. In fact, Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, said, "Consumer response to the promotion was beyond anything we imagined, and we had a big imagination." The same has been true at each of these retailers. So what is causing these heavy traffic days? Certainly media and marketing hype has something to do with it. But these aspects don’t totally account for such dramatic gains. The answer seems to lie in different places for different retailers. According to Hitwise traffic share data, Wal-Mart.com experienced a huge spike in traffic on November 23rd. So it looks like Wal-Mart had a huge influx of customers looking for big offline deals for Black Friday. The other retailers, Overstock, Amazon.com, Macys.com all had increases in traffic over the last three weeks, but no giant spike in unique visitors like Wal-Mart. This data says to me that these retailers had a great number of the same customers constantly pinging their sites to be first “in-line” when the promoted deals went live. Customers are moving their offline waiting behavior to online and instead of filling up the parking lot or bruising their fellow shoppers offline, they are “waiting in line” online and slowing down or crashing the sites a bit.