Poor preparation from UK e-retailers could result in lost sales on the UK’s biggest online shopping day, Mega Monday.
Research from website monitoring company, Site Confidence, an NCC Group company said that e-retailers were sent a warning of what was to come when websites slowed on Monday (29.11.10), the UK’s second biggest online shopping day.
The research showed average download speeds of the UK’s top e-retailers slowed to more than 11 seconds, slower than the desired eight second target.
Site Confidence also revealed some websites experienced short periods of downtime, with a small number crashing for brief periods. However, there were no prolonged website outages.
The findings will concern e-retailers in the build up to Mega Monday (6th December). Customers typically switch to an alternative website after an average of four seconds, meaning the prospect of an 11 second wait could damage sales as websites try to capitalise on the Christmas rush.
Bob Dowson, director at Site Confidence, said: “These findings are significant as they show many of our top e-retailers have not prepared their websites sufficiently to deal with the vastly increased web traffic. Customers will simply switch to a rival brand providing the same products, if a website is failing to operate quickly or is not responding.
“Worryingly for these e-retailers, it is now too late for them to prevent crashes or sluggish download speeds, despite the fact that these risks were recognised several months ago. Rigorous load testing should have been carried out to ensure these websites had the capacity to handle increased web traffic and maximise sales.”
Source: www.siteconfidence.com
