Ouch! Pennywise and Pound Foolish ?
Here are some companies who have had some “extra fun” this Black Friday –
Best Buy
- Best Buy’s Website BestBuy.com Crashes and Goes Down on Black Friday | Re/code.- Best Buy released a statement saying the outage was caused by a sudden severe spike in mobile traffic. “If you intend to be one of the leaders among sales in technology and electronics … maybe, just maybe you should know how to run tech,” one unhappy consumer said on Best Buy’s Facebook page.
- It’s hurting the company. Best Buy’s website goes down on Black Friday.- Online sales are key for Best Buy, which says it experienced nearly 20% growth in the US in that sector for the fiscal year that ended Feb. 1, Fortune reports.
Nike
- Nike.com on Twitter: – “http://t.co/KGtR94dEpV is experiencing problems processing orders. Hang tight while we investigate. The Jordan 6 Retro is not sold out yet.”.
In the UK, Net-a-Porter
- Net-a-Porter crashes as it launches sale ahead of Black Friday | Daily Mail Online. – Just as they started their end-of-season sale! The marketing team must be pretty frustrated.
Also in the UK, John Lewis, Argos, Tesco Direct, Curry’s, and others
- BBC News – Black Friday: Websites swamped by record demand.- This article names at lease 4 commerce websites that have run into trouble. Yeah, Since a few years ago with an Amazon ad campaign folks in the UK now have a Black Friday like the Yanks!
All of these sites are losing money. It hurts their brands. Don’t take my word for this, here’s what a British retail industry website says about this – Web warning as retailers battle to handle Black Friday traffic – Essential Retail.
Do you think it’s cheaper to be online without knowing what your website and mobile apps can and cannot handle? Will your site and apps be able to handle traffic spikes? Do you know whether you can restore them gracefully if their servers get swamped?
It’s bad enough when this happened in earlier times, like the classic IBM website failures during the LA Olympics. These days, it can be worse. Word about this year’s outages was spread by folks on social media too. On the web, everyone knows right away. Everyone watches the company stumble. Maybe they’re thinking about how they could understand their software behaviors now?
Testing for capacity, robustness and operational health metrics does not need to slow down your development cycles. It does require focus and attention, just like any other feature of your website or app. Handle performance like a business feature and you will enhance your business.
