With a predicted £1.3 billion set to be spent in Black Friday sales and online shopping likely to account for around 70% of purchases, the stakes were high for ecommerce. So what went wrong? The challenge for most sites is, of course, handling the massive spikes in traffic so that customer experience isn’t negatively impacted.
As well as retailers losing sales today through lack of web capacity (or perhaps lack of realism when pre-testing capacity of web systems): such as the Argos problem as below, it also looks like many retail websites will be losing sales on Black Friday, as their 3rd-party lead-generation tools are not working this morning, with resulting loss in CRO.
In addition, some online Marketing Directors will be in the dark when they come to do their post-Black Friday wash-up next week – because a number of the 3rd-party tracking/big data services are failing today.
Looking at the web performance of eCommerce sites, there are some things that make the Holiday sector unique. We work with a number of holiday companies and they have a unique challenge when it comes to accurate website monitoring.
When a holiday season nears its end, holiday companies are often presented with an increasing number of failed ‘user journeys’ that occur when a holiday is found by the visitor but is actually already sold out. And these failed journeys need to be identified and quantified, if they are to enable an accurate reflection of lost sales.
“We won’t see retailers that don’t have transactional websites in 10 years time”
Internet Retailing Magazine write in The Key To Retail 2010.
10 years? Why so cautious?
Any day now – would be my take on that.
Of course, as other folk have recorded, despite market growth, the credit crunch is impacting retailers online.
So it’s clear that the online commercial environment is set to become far more competitive in the near future, and as a result the web customer is likely to have higher expectations regarding their online experience. Respectively we can expect to see an increase in so called ‘web rage’ as users display even lower tolerance levels with site errors and slow page delivery; when there are so many other websites a mouse-click away vying for their attention, and more than willing to take their business, customers are under no obligation to remain brand loyal.
It sounds like it should be the first metric we all want from our website – what’s the money value of Lost Sales due to problems on the site this month? And how do we fix them, and not lose the same again next month?
I’m talking about problems in the final delivery – the website platform itself – where we’ve brought buyers to the site and then let them down through any number of root causes: sporadic technology glitches, treacly slow experience for maybe 10% of users, code upgrades that killed functionality for a few precious hours and so on.
