Yes, that was a terrible pun in the title. My apologies. After a certain amount of working on the title of one’s blog post, one begins to suspect that one is wasting one’s time, if you see what I mean.
Anyhow, I suspect that as the editor of a technology publication, I’m in more of a position than most to witness the wealth of communication that precedes “Cyber Monday,” but I’m not quite certain how widely observed the occasion is.
I understand that “Black Friday” is an event. It’s in the calendar. Perhaps not literally, but it’s a widely accepted cultural and media (and shopping) event. The ceremonial kick-off to the “holiday shopping season.” Not always the classiest of occasions, as I’m sure you’ve heard.
Cyber Monday, we’re told, is the day when we all search for online bargains at the office instead of working. There seems to be some debate as to the truth of that. I’m not exactly “skeptical,” but let’s call me “curious.”
The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro acknowledges the skeptics in this “Cyber Monday” post. And the comment section seems to have attracted more spammers interested in the event than shoppers.
My suspicion is that Cyber Monday is more of a semi-realized marketing idea than the full-blown cultural event Black Friday. But online retailers can try, and shoppers seem to respond.
From a hosting standpoint, the question (asked in a thousand emailed story pitches) is “how equipped are online retailers to weather the spike in online shopping that will accompany the holiday season?”
Application performance monitoring company Gomez sent out a press release today saying it had monitored the performance of some of the top online retailers during the period from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. Easthen time on Cyber Monday, and pointed out that some of them experienced downtime.
According to the release “Gomez measures the duration (response time) and success rate (availability) of a typical online shopping experience, from home page to product search to shopping cart and checkout.”
The company reported trouble with the sites of three retailers: Victoria’s Secret, Williams Sonoma and Dell.
- Victoria’s Secret home page is running well but shoppers trying to place items in the shopping cart receive a site unavailable page and are unable to proceed. The issue started at 10am ET and is still continuing.
- Williams-Sonoma’s website experienced slowdowns at the shopping cart/view payment pages with a typical transaction slowing from 26 seconds at 6am ET to almost 50 seconds between 7- 9am ET. The site returned to a steady 24-second response time at 10am ET.
- Dell’s website returned an error to returning shoppers between 9.40am-10.15am. Shoppers were unable to retrieve pre-populated account information, meaning they had to start-over filling out forms when checking out. The issue was quickly resolved.
I guess that amounts to a tangible impact. I’d love to know if any hosting providers are seeing that work its way into their business.
Have your customers selling online increased their capacity in the last week?
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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