All early indicators suggest that the 2003 holiday shopping season will be the best ever for eCommerce Web sites. But for those that failed to plan for the increased traffic, there have been road bumps that could result in lost sales and customer dissatisfaction.
According to an e-spending survey from Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen NetRatings, U.S. consumers went online and spent $8.5 billion last month, 55 percent more than November 2002.
The survey looked at all the major shopping sites including Amazon, eBay, QVC, Target, Wal-Mart, and many more. The biggest category was apparel at $1.6 billion, up 33 percent. After that, it was video/DVD, up 133 percent, then books, up 61 percent, and Music/toys/games, up 32 percent.
Executives from several of the largest eRetailers said that snowy weather in the Northeastern U.S. helped push shoppers online during the first week of December.
A report in the Monday, Dec. 15 New York Times covered the dark side of the good news: that several of the most popular online merchants have struggled to cope with heavy holiday traffic. The article, by eCommerce columnist Bob Tedeschi, referred to a report released by Keynote Systems, a company that tracks Web site performance.
The article says that four online retailers in Keynote’s eCommerce index – J.C. Penney, Sears, OfficeMax and Nordstrom – failed on numerous occasions when Keynote’s automated systems attempted to complete purchases during the first week of December. For instance, Keynote said it was unable to complete the 6-step checkout process on the Sears site 17 percent of the time. When told of Keynote’s findings, a spokesman for OfficeMax acknowledged that shopping carts on their Web site are being abandoned 10 percent more often than in the period before Thanksgiving.
Not all of the eCommerce sites in Keynote’s index performed as poorly as those mentioned previously. According to the NY Times article, Walmart.com’s Web site performance ranked third in Keynote’s index in speed and transaction success rate, just behind Eddie Bauer and Amazon.com. A Walmart.com spokesman said they were prepared for the extra traffic through a system they use to forecast usage by monitoring their advertising hits in Yahoo’s Overture and Google Adwords.
There is a lesson for all eCommerce Web sites in the experience this holiday season. Bad Web site performance during the holidays can mean a loss of as much as 1 percent of total annual eCommerce revenues. With a little planning, additional holiday Web site traffic needn’t be a mixed blessing.
