The days between Thanksgiving and Christmas mean big money for retailers, and with the increase in online shopping revenue, glitches in a retailer's website could be incredibly costly. Not only will an outage cause shoppers to be unable to make purchases, but also a faulty or poorly functioning website will turn off the consumer and likely lead them to a competitor.
According to an article on wired.com, online shopping carts will carry about 16 percent of this year's total projected revenue, roughly $96 billion in sales.
The article cited analyst firms like Gartner, IDC, Aberdeen and others that publish estimates of hourly downtime cost for the average company, and how many hours of downtime per year they are likely to log.
The estimates reveal that the average company can expect to be down more than 10 hours per year at a cost of $100,000 per hour.
No doubt that zero downtime tops the Christmas wish list of the 77 percent of retailers that invested in uptime improvements for their e-retail sites. It remains to be seen how successful they will be, but the stakes are high. Customers go where they are treated best. Investing in uptime protection and downtime prevention builds customer loyalty, which increases the probability of a Happy New Year.
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