Holiday rush clogs retail websites

A FIRM that tracks website performance said over the weekend that many large retailers' websites slowed down due to very high traffic volumes on Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

Keynote Competitive Research released statistics showing that almost a third of big retail companies's ecommerce operations suffered significant response time degradations of up to 400 per cent of normal on these first major shopping days of this year's holiday season.

It said Lowe's, Macy's and Victoria's Secret were hit especially hard, with Office Depot, Borders bookstores and Buy.com also suffering notable transaction response slowdowns.

Keynote's Shawn White said the worst sluggishness affected "product search and checkout processes." Delays experienced by punters "presumably will impact online sales," he said.

Some transaction response times went from 5 or 10 seconds to around 15 or 25 seconds. He said bad response "will lead to consumers abandoning a product search or checkout."

Today is Cyber Monday, when up to 72 million consumers are expected to go shop online, predicted the US National Retail Federation. Just don't expect very good response times. µ

L'INQ
Eweek