Black Friday to Cyber Monday. That time of the year when we fight the crowds and traffic to squeeze a month’s worth of shopping into just a few fleeting days. Having worked in retail during my college years, I remember the customers lined up outside before 4:00 a.m., chomping at
We all know that Black Friday and Cyber Monday can strike fear in the minds of e-commerce companies but let’s take a look at why. These two dates represent the busiest times of year for e-commerce companies and this year, industry pundits predict that traffic will be the highest in history. Learn how website monitoring can help protect revenues and keep your customers happy.
Could a lack of Black Friday website outages in 2012 indicate a middle age for e-commerce? At this point during the holiday season of Black Friday 2012 and Cyber Monday 2012 online retail websites are more stable, but slower, and have increased in size, according to our monitoring and data we’ve seen. Moreover, these same websites are increasingly composed of a family of third-party hosted elements, that are “cooler” but are often less stable than the website itself. While 2012 didn’t see Black Friday website outages in the manner of 2011, there is an apparent e-commerce shift, perhaps indicative of a middle age.
Better prepared. Get a monitoring service that conducts automatic trace route diagnostics when downtime and outages occur. And lets dream a little here…won’t it be cool if a website monitoring service took a video of the error and you could play it back so you could see what your user’s experienced? Website monitoring with video capture of downtime errors…so 2013 sounding, isn’t it? Or is it?
The big day came and you had the high ground, your website was great, you even had some good, cheap monitoring in place, but oops…it turns out that monitoring was a little too cheap. It turns out your “hey, this is cheap” website monitoring service cached the Domain Name Server (DNS) process. You had a DNS issue and you didn’t know it …but your customers did.
For some online retailers the post Black Thursday eve, post Black Friday, post Cyber Monday analysis will be a time of joy and dreaming about a repeat in Black Friday 2013. For others it will be a tired “it was a perfect storm” excuse and finger pointing starting on Tuesday morning Nov. 27, 212. Why? Because invariably there are going to be websites that crash and burn during these peak days in the Black Friday 2012 online retail season. So, lets jump ahead, Back to the Future-style, and provide a few advance diagnostics that these soon-to-be, crash-and-burn online retail websites could have done in 5-minutes to save their 2012 seasons – before the big online shopping days actually arrive.
Dotcom-Monitor recently chose 20 midsized online companies to monitor for one week from those ranked 500-600 in the Internet Retailer 2011 ranking. We focused our monitoring on a demographic that encompasses what is considered a mid-size company, not large enough to have inexhaustible budgets, and just large enough to begin considering ways to optimize web site performance. By testing their websites at a 15-minute frequency from nine North American monitoring locations for seven days using a non-caching, Internet Explorer browser we were able to pinpoint potential areas to improve and issues to avoid.
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