Glitches Spoil Cyber Monday for Some Retailers

On your mark, get set, go...nowhere. At least that is what happened over the weekend and on Cyber Monday to some of the top retail sites that experienced problems due to the surge of shoppers to the sites.

As retailers scrambled to post big bargains and shoppers scoured the web in search of the best prices, some websites could not handle the traffic. Outages and major slowdowns disappointed and frustrated shoppers and caused a loss of sales to those retailers experiencing website problems.

"Even the largest brands in retailing are not immune to web performance issues," says Matt Poepsel, vice president at Gomez, Inc. "The issue is that retailers are trying every trick in the book to wring sales out of their websites, but when website complexity meets volume of shoppers, there's just more opportunity for things to go wrong. The math is quite simple: website down, revenue lost, shoppers go elsewhere."

Top 25 Online Retailers Performance Tested

For the hours of 6 a.m. ET - 12 p.m. ET, Gomez tested the Top 25 online retailers for Cyber Monday and reported the following:

• Victoria's Secret home page was running well but shoppers trying to place items in the shopping cart received a site unavailable page and were unable to proceed. The issue started at 10 a.m.
  
  
• Williams-Sonoma's website experienced slowdowns at the shopping cart/view payment pages with a typical transaction slowing from 26 seconds at 6 a.m. ET to almost 50 seconds between 7 - 9 a.m. The site returned to a steady 24 second response time at 10am ET.
  
  
• Dell's website returned an error to returning shoppers between 9:40 a.m. - 10:15 a.m. 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.

Gomez's tests of the Top 25 online retailers for Friday and Saturday reported the following:

• Costco experienced an availability problem on Friday with about 64 percent availability for the period 6 a.m. - Midnight. The problem began sometime after 3 p.m. and lasted until 8 p.m. Comparative availability for Costco on Saturday was significantly improved at over 91 percent.
  
  
• HP Shopping exhibited longer response times - nearly 45 seconds overall - on Friday, but by Saturday had returned to normal levels at about 13 seconds.
  
  
• Overstock, a perennially strong performer at around 5-6 seconds, slowed to more than 17 seconds on average on Friday.
  
  
• Sears suffered major availability problems, coming in at just over 61 percent availability for Friday, but turned in a 100 percent performance on Saturday.
  
  
• Staples availability was somewhat off at 84 percent for Friday but had increased to 95 percent for Saturday.

My Unofficial Test

Saturday afternoon I made a purchase at Sears.com and everything went perfectly. I was totally satisfied. But by early Sunday morning, things began to break down. The sale price on items did not appear in the shopping carts. The customer service department suggested taking a screen shot of the item, processing the purchase at regular price, then trying to use the screen shot to get the difference refunded back on the following day during normal hours. I decided to wait until the following day to make the purchase, but by the time I got around to it, I was no longer as enthusiastic about the purchase and decided to think about it more.

Your Experiences

Did you experience any problems shopping online over the weekend and on Cyber Monday? Tell us about it below.

See Also: Retail Sales Marred by Web Performance Issues, Reports Gomez, Inc.

_{Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images}