When all Else Fails… what can a retailer do when their website crashes?

Here are at Capacitas we focus on addressing the technical challenges in businesses meeting the expectations of their customers. In simple terms for retailers it means we ensure their websites can cope with the increased demand brought about by an event like Black Friday.

So what should a retailer do faced with a site that is about to crash or already has? Essentially there are two options, both need planning ahead of the issue to be truly effective of course.

1. Turn off supplementary services. What services are using up capacity that might not be crucial?
2. Holding page. There is nothing worse than simply not reaching a web page when you are in pursuit of a bargain, at least a holding page explains to the customer that something is wrong. It might not earn loyalty, but it does offer an explanation – especially if inspired!

When it comes to loyalty there are steps you can take that might just keep someone coming back and a great example came from online clothing retailer Forever 21 just this week. 

They emailed their customer database and admitted to having had issues on the website on Sunday into Monday and by way of saying sorry they offered 30 per cent off any full price item on its website for one day only.

This is clever on two fronts. Firstly by admitting to a problem that many might not have been aware of it creates trust and a sense of loyalty which makes them want to support. Then the discount encourages the customer to spend with them, ahead of Black Friday. This in theory spreads the load assuming people will spend a finite amount of money.

Skype did much the same when they suffered an outage and gave full disclosure of the problems users might have encountered and credited their paying users with 20 minutes of free calls. Negligible cost to Skype and encourages their paying users to remain loyal and use the 20 minutes. It may have even reminded some to use Skype more.

All these mitigation steps cost money, and here at Capacitas we help retailers direct these costs in a more productive manner; such as ensuring their websites do not crash on Black Friday.

We know our customers have good dedicated people, and they have often invested significantly in software and tooling. The missing element is typically methodology – i.e. what is the structured process that brings it all together to drive performance and keep that site live? This where Capacitas would like to help.

If you would like to learn more about our Prepare for Peak and Performance Testing solutions, please click below, to see our latest Ebook.