Holiday Traffic Surges Test E-Commerce Site Reliability

As the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear, a recent Network Solutions industry survey and research report looked the pressure that e-commerce merchants are under during the peak of the retail season—in particular, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Researchers at the e-commerce solution provider identified issues that sites face when traffic suddenly spikes. They found that site reliability is a genuine bottom-line issue rather than just a technicality for retailers and brands.

The report’s authors said that technical failures on higher-traffic shopping days go beyond the customer just staring at an error screen. Abandoned carts due to slow pages or payment gateway timeouts are a major factor in customers simply switching their allegiance to a competitor.

Unexpected site downtime or poor performance during a major shopping event results in immediate money loss and long-term damage to a retailer’s reputation. When thousands of shoppers are all wanting to buy from a merchant at the same time, business owners will quickly hit the limits of their server infrastructure, database connection limits and checkout process.

The report revealed that of those businesses surveyed, 61 percent said they experienced a website failure or serious slowdown during a sale or traffic surge in the past year, while 32 percent reported a payment or checkout failure that prevented orders during a sale or traffic surge.

Among those respondents whose sites had failed, 72 percent said high traffic or hosting limits as the cause, while 36 percent said it took more than an hour to restore full functionality. Of those polled that failed, 9 percent said they were down for at least three hours or lost the rest of the sale.

The report’s authors said among business website owners and managers whose business counts on Black Friday, 31 percent of respondents said they have not started getting their site ready for this year.

The survey also shows that a lot of the smaller and mid-sized businesses simply don’t appreciate the sheer volume of requests that are made during a peak period like the holidays and are not prepared for the traffic spikes.

When asked about what went wrong during a transaction, 50 percent of those polled said the site loaded too slowly. And 25 percent said there was a payment failure. Twenty-one percent said their sites crashed, and 20 percent said during a peak selling period, there were checkout errors.

Other issues cited for website failures include payment gateway issues (22 percent), hitting hosting limits (19 percent), and sites that were out of date (11 percent).

For the upcoming Black Friday holiday kickoff, 39 percent of respondents said they conducted load or stress testing as preparation, and 37 percent said they were testing purchases. Of those polled, 32 percent said they were scaling up hosting as a way to prepare, while 31 percent said they were preparing an emergency plan.

Aside from rigorous stress testing, the report’s authors recommend merchants have a solid cloud platform and also conduct capacity planning in advance of the holiday season so that their digital shops are in a position to cope with surging traffic.