Commentary

The Black Friday effect: What happens when websites fail

Kyle Herring, director of digital marketing, Quantum Metric, explains how e-commerce environments are continuously in a state of flux and there will always be errors, confusion, and a consistent series of digital items to address. That's why e-tailers must embrace constant change.

Photo by iStock.com

December 13, 2018

By Kyle Herring, director of digital marketing, Quantum Metric

Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 have yet again broken records for online sales. Year over year, figures have jumped a whopping 23.6 percent according to reports released by CNBC. This translates into what Fortune estimates to be $6.22 billion dollars in online sales — at a time when physical store sales are showing a slight decline.

The problem is that not all retailers were prepared for this shift in buyer behavior. Notable retailers like Lowes, J. Crew, and Walmart all struggled with various technical difficulties that directly impacted their ability to convert sales.

Every second a website is down costs companies money. A lot of it. Think about this, to achieve the figures noted above, online sales transactions were running at an average of $8.64 million a minute. For J. Crew, the impact lasted several hours and resulted in an estimated $775 thousand in lost in sales.

Ensuring your piece of the $144,000/second pie

To capture the greatest opportunity from this retail bonanza, online retails must provide a seamless customer experience. This goes far beyond simply keeping their website live. Each step in the consumer buying process must be optimized to ensure customers don't struggle with their transactions and abandon the sale.

Complicating this however is the fact that online retailing has become a wildly complex environment. Websites must be cleanly served across different browsers and across desktop, mobile, and tablet platforms. These experiences must then dynamically adapt to customer behavior in order to maximize the potential to convert sales. When multiplied by product inventories that can easily be of hundreds, if not thousands, of products, the effort behind this optimization is wildly complex.

Struggle can also occur at any point in the customer journey. A page fails to load quickly. A promo code doesn't work. A link points to a page that isn't found, A shopping cart won't let a customer check out. All are reasons for a sale to be abandoned.

If you're finding out on Twitter, it's already too late

It's no secret that Twitter has evolved into one of the leading platform for consumers to voice their frustration. On Black Friday this is no different. For example, one shopper posted this on his Twitter account: Since @lowes is down I'm gonna go to @Sears and @HomeDepotDeals #BlackFriday

The impact of statements like this go far beyond a single lost sale. With the potential viral spread of social posts being almost limitless, hundreds, if not thousands of sales can be impacted. And aside from the immediate loss of sales, impact to brand loyalty can leave a long lingering negative effect on revenue as well.

There's no single fix...

One might think that there would be a simple answer for online retailers to implement that would ensure both reliable website availability and a smooth customer experience. Sadly that's not the case.

Online environments are continuously in a state of flux. Because of this constant change, there will always be errors, confusion, and a consistent series of digital items to address. And while nothing can stop this, eretailers can embrace constant change as a norm and engineer teams and processes in ways promote speed and responsiveness to issues as they arise.

A data-driven solution

With so much lost/won revenue at stake, leading online retail organizations are placing a high priority around efforts to improve the digital customer experience. Learning from recent advancements implemented in systems operation and application development environments, these organizations are structuring efforts around identifying and fixing incidents as quickly as possible.

It's now common for an online retailer to maintain an active "war room" as a first line response team for maintaining website stability and safeguarding the customer experience. Similar to NASA's Mission Control Center or a modern Network Operations Center that oversees complex networking environments, these teams actively monitor e-commerce performance and react to issues that could impact customer conversion.

War room teams are filled with screens that display an array of real-time site metrics. Here representative from multiple digital disciplines work together to triage issues and then collaborate finding and implementing fixes as quickly as possible.

The data that these teams ingest far surpasses a traditional web analytics package that tracks traffic sources, user sessions, and page views. They monitor detailed analytics around user behaviors, the effectiveness of conversion events, and the speed at which transactions are managed.

By capturing additional data around how individuals interact with a website, teams can look back into the specific activities that led a user to struggle — and better identify the required fix.

How to focus in the storm

Because of the environment of constant change that most web teams leave in, they are constantly working against an extensive backlog of requests. For teams that operate e-commerce sites at scale, this problem becomes especially daunting. Understanding how to prioritize work in order to best support revenue generation therefore becomes an essential part of the equation.

For this to happen, analytics also need to clearly be able to associate an issue with the direct impact that it has on revenue. Previously this had been done by assigning often arbitrary values on actions, however modern analytics capabilities have advanced to "scrape" actual costs based on cart values that offer complete clarity of lost opportunity costs associated with website errors.

Everybody wins

As consumer behavior continues to shift online, e-commerce providers that prioritize high availability and improved customer experiences ultimately drive a two-tiered benefit. Not only do they stand to gain from the financial benefits based on higher volumes of online transactions — but their customers in turn also gain from a seamless, if not even enjoyable, purchase process.

This win-win value proposition ultimately sets the stage to further drive innovation and excellence across e-commerce environments, leading to advancements in technical digital transformation and long term customer satisfaction. On the flip side, e-retailers that don't actively embrace the drive for innovation in the customer experience they provide will almost certainly lose market share to those that do.