A fifth of the IMRG‘s top 50 online retailers‘ websites crashed before 9am today as unprecedented demand saturated them.
Boots, Argos and Game experienced severe disruption over the last 12 hours, a live tracker by Ampersand revealed. The tracker, which monitors the uptime, downtime and response times of websites, showed that they had been unable to handle the surge in traffic.
This isn‘t the first time that Argos‘s website has crashed recently. It also buckled under pressure at the start of the Black Friday sales period.
Other websites such as Amazon and M&S managed to weather the storm and were able to run efficiently.
“For retailers that have been adversely affected by increased Black Friday traffic online, now is the perfect time to act fast and gather all the data they have available to them,” said Managing Director of Ampersand Darryl Adie. “Although it‘s a long way off, the next few weeks should be used to prepare for Black Friday 2016. Ever-extending sales periods like this are notoriously hard to predict. Retailers should immediately delve deep into hour-by-hour analytics reporting and cross check with how and when systems outages occurred. Starting load and performance testing right away will give retailers the best chance of avoiding outages next year.”
