As the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear, a recent Network Solutions industry survey and research report looked the pressure that e-commerce merchants are under during the peak of the retail season—in particular, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Researchers at the e-commerce solution provider identified issues that sites face when traffic suddenly spikes. They found that site reliability is a genuine bottom-line issue rather than just a technicality for retailers and brands.
Related Stories
Budget Realities and AI Discovery Reshape Holiday Decor Demand
Holiday Shoppers Are Giving Secondhand a Second Look
The report’s authors said that technical failures on higher-traffic shopping days go beyond the customer just staring at an error screen. Abandoned carts due to slow pages or payment gateway timeouts are a major factor in customers simply switching their allegiance to a competitor.
Unexpected site downtime or poor performance during a major shopping event results in immediate money loss and long-term damage to a retailer’s reputation. When thousands of shoppers are all wanting to buy from a merchant at the same time, business owners will quickly hit the limits of their server infrastructure, database connection limits and checkout process.
The report revealed that of those businesses surveyed, 61 percent said they experienced a website failure or serious slowdown during a sale or traffic surge in the past year, while 32 percent reported a payment or checkout failure that prevented orders during a sale or traffic surge.
Among those respondents whose sites had failed, 72 percent said high traffic or hosting limits as the cause, while 36 percent said it took more than an hour to restore full functionality.
Source link
