Cyber Monday Woes

Cyber Monday has become a challenge for both consumers and retailers as the online shopping has become the rule and not the exception. More consumers and retailers have embraced the idea of online deals and this year, increased traffic has caused an outage on some of America’s largest shopping websites such as Target and PayPal. An analysis of recent years cyber shopping trends was published on CNBC and below is a short summary of the article.

This Cyber Monday, retailer websites have suffered due to 1) increased traffic and 2) increased website bloat. According to Dynatrance, a digital performance tracking platform, websites have gotten feature heavy and consumers have noticed slow load times and bugs. It seems the combination of the two trends, increasing popularity of cyber shopping and increasing complexity of retailer websites, have created a chaotic drain on website resources. Dynatrance claims that retailers performed better this year than in 2014.

Retailers are focused in maintaining their websites. The larger retailers have an additional 10 to 20 machines running and smaller retailer rely on the cloud. ChannelAdvisor, an e-Commerce optimization firm, claims that for every hour a retailer’s website is down, the retailer loses an estimate of 4% of their revenue for the day. In Dynatrance’s poll of more than 5000 people, 75% of smartphone and tablets users say they would abandon a retailers’ mobile site or app if it was too buggy. 50% of adults in the survey also claim that they would find an alternative if app/site took more than 3 seconds to load. Another interesting thing to note is that consumers were flocking to retailers’ mobile sites instead of downloading their app.

Source: Krystina Gustafson http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/30/cyber-monday-why-retailers-cant-keep-their-sites-from-crashing.html