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.

I get to sit in on a lot of meetings with clients, who are looking to improve the ROI of their websites.

The most interesting ones are with organisations that have evolved far enough along the eCommerce evolutionary path to realise that it’s no good IT and Business teams sitting in separate silos.