Online retailers overloaded on Black Friday

When people talk about "economic slowdown," I am pretty sure this is not what they mean: So many buyers flocked to popular online retail sites on Black Friday that many sites slowed to unpleasant levels under the crush.

Keynote Systems said Friday of the 30 sites it tracks, 15 percent had noticeable performance problems. The problems were mostly in the sites' shopping cart and checkout systems, not the catalog functions.

"Every year, we see a handful of Web sites that aren't ready for the holiday rush. The problems are in the shopping cart experience, where you cannot complete a purchase," Shawn White, director of external operations for mobile and Internet testing firm Keynote Systems told me.

I experienced this for myself Friday. Shopping on the HP site (for printer supplies, sadly, not gifts), I found navigating from page to page so slow that I eventually gave up.

According to the Associated Press, Sears.com was offline for two hours Friday. Kohl's and Saks also had problems. Amazon and Target slowed, but not critically.

Although 15 percent of the Keynote-tracked sites had issues this year, last year the number was 30 percent. Wal-Mart, which did poorly last year, has functioned well this season so far. Costco, NewEgg, Best Buy, Dell, and Apple also performed well.

"I'm kind of bullish on online shopping," White said. "We're still seeing people flocking to Web sites, shopping for deals." Online sites are "are having to cut prices even deeper, since brick-and mortar-shops are offering incredible deals to get customers into stores," he said.

Looking on the bright side, perhaps this means that the online retailers' economic stimulus packages (deep discounts) are working, and people are buying things on this first day after Thanksgiving, according to the usual U.S. holiday custom.

[HlLLARY CLITON]

Sears website was crappy all day, I gave up even trying to get to it

[tm_anon]

This is an area they could seriously use affiliates for. Pay for affiliates to install a program on their comps and sign a contract stating that on certain days, they will leave their computers connected to the internet so their connections become extra bandwidth. Then the pay for those affiliates is based off of the extra bandwidth needed. problem solved.

[timber2005]

You have NEVER worked in a server environment have you?
Unless I misunderstood you, you're suggesting that the "affilate" leave their computers on to serve the higher volume of people for a main company.

Except those "computers" need the files (pages) the customers need to be useful! Otherwise they have to forward* the request to a server which already is overloaded from outer requests, which defeats the purpose and only adds lag time.
*it's more likely it would just serve an error page...

[OpticalMatrix]

Costco.com website had issues with their shopping cart and payment processing system from 4:00pm(mst) to about 6:00pm

[Lerianis]

This is absolutely stupid. People are more and more going to online websites to get good deals on computer hardware, software, etc. as well as numerous other non-computer items..... so the best thing to do is to have excess capacity at all times. If your site crashed last year.... have twice the amount, at least, of capacity and you most likely won't have a problem the next year.

[hupernikao]

I had big trouble trying to buy a few items in NewEgg.com. Like Rafe pointed out about the other sites, the catalog part worked ok, however, right after 12am PT I couldn't log-in, and I couldn't even add anything to the cart... I finally gave up and when I checked again in the morning, the issue was resolved but the stuff I was trying to buy was already sold out! Thanks!!! NewEgg.com

[mcmike1953]

"Welcome back" Michael Dell!

[rtuinenburg]

I guess these companies never heard of "load testing"

[JonathonStriker]

I used apple.com myself to order an early Christmas present during the Friday sale. Had no problems with apple's website at all, and got what I wanted fast. Some companies just know better when it comes to maintaining web servers for high traffic. I don't trust Target or Wal-Mart to know much about that.

[myles taylor]

Well Apple has a lot of experience in stuff like that. Their servers went down several times during product launches and I can't imagine that they had more traffic than that yesterday.

[gsmiller88]

I tried comparing prices between the Apple Store and MacMall and MacMall was painfully slow for me. Apple's website ran like a champ and I didn't have zero problems, as did Amazon and Buy.com. I'm quite surprised Sears.com did so bad, I wonder how Kmart.com fared since they're basically the same thing just with different color schemes.

[jspk8]

microsoft's live cashback site was down for the whole morning yesterday. couldn't believe it'd happen to microsoft.

[mattumanu]

I hate auto playing video. I've said this over and over again and yet you people still have ads that play video automatically. The iPhone ad that plays at the top of the main page has no way to stop it after it starts. Therefore, I've blacklisted this site on my network for the weekend. We'll see what happens by monday.

[dmlanger]

Article says NewEgg did well, thats not the case. NewEgg went down at midnight PST on black friday, it didnt come up until 2 AM PST and had problems the whole day.