In a case of what can go wrong, will go wrong, Sears found that its website went down for a couple of hours at the start of the holiday shopping season. According to the research firm Keynote Systems, Sears.com was down for two hours on Black Friday.
Other merchants, including Amazon.com, Kohl's, Saks and Target, also experienced some technical difficulties as sites slowed down a slight bit as consumer traffic increased. Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems, told The Associated Press, that transactions that took 25 seconds at Amazon and Target the week before took 40 seconds on Friday morning.
Particularly troubling for Sears is that this is the second straight year the retailer saw its site come to a halt on Black Friday. Neiman Marcus, which also saw its site go down last year, did not experience any such issues this year, according to Keynote.
Keynote tracks the performance of roughly 30 top retailers online with computers in 10 major cities across the country taking measurements every 15 minutes. The company is expecting more sites to slow down or crash today as shopper traffic picks up on Cyber Monday.
Discussion Questions: Are most consumers who shop online sensitive to the fact that the higher numbers accessing websites during the holidays can slow down or perhaps even crash retail sites? How big an issue is slow performance or nonperformance when it comes to retaining customers online?