According to a survey by the Swedish Retail Institute (HUI), e-commerce will have a much more prosperous Christmas than the traditional retail trade. As many as 50 per cent of all e-retailers anticipated record sales this Christmas. But this also means bigger demands on their web availability. According to SiteScanner’s survey, SEK 104 million in revenues will be lost because of downtime and long response times on the Internet.
This year 6 out of 10 people will be buying their Christmas gifts online. Consumers in HUI’s survey responded that they will be e-shopping for Christmas gifts this year because it saves time, money and the hassle of visiting overcrowded stores.
Competition for the customer is fierce and on the Internet the next store is only a click away. This means that those who are best-prepared to meet the Christmas rush will win the battle for the customer.
While for most e-retailers (44 percent) the great surge of visitors happens in December, for a significant portion (24 percent) the surge peak comes as early as November.
SiteScanner’s survey shows that e-commerce stands to lose up to SEK 104 million over the Christmas shopping season, a figure that would be much smaller if more people were better prepared to meet the shopping surge.
“Companies that want to be assured of handling the rush of e-shoppers should do a load test before the season begins. This will tell them how much traffic their websites can take. It is also very important to know how long it takes for your website to load – remember that it only takes two seconds before the customers start to lose their patience,” says Olle Bodelius, CEO at SiteScanner.
An alarming number of e-retail companies have no strategy for quality-assuring their websites from the visitor’s perspective. In a questionnaire compiled by Web Service Award, 62 percent of webmasters at Sweden’s largest websites confessed to not having any external supervision solution for their websites.
“There’s a lot of money to be saved if more businesses thought about prioritising external web availability,” says Olle Bodelius.
