Walmart, Nieman Marcus, Target all experiencing issues due to heightened volume.
As the battle for online shoppers heats up this holiday season, a number of retailers may be suffering the loss of sales due to website slowdowns or outages caused by heightened volume. On Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, both Walmart and Nieman Marcus reported “hiccups” on their website performances, as the stronger demand slowed online checkout for some shoppers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Steve Bratspies, Walmart’s new chief merchant, said that did “slow down for a little bit when customers were checking out,” but reported that “the vast majority had not issue,” when shopping via the site, according to Nasdaq.com. He also reported that more individuals shopped online this Thanksgiving than in 2014.
“As [discounts] became available online, we saw in incredible surge of traffic,” a spokeswoman told Nasdaq in an email. She reported that the website slowed down, but did not crash.
The websites are particularly frustrating in light of the concerted investment Walmart is making in its ecommerce arm, as it tries to counter growing competition from Amazon.com and other online retailers.
Target Corp. also offered most of its Black Friday deals early online this year, and Target CEO Brian Cornell said the retailer's website had no issues handling the holiday traffic last week and that he was pleased with the site's performance. Target had bolstered its online capabilities in the wake of the troubled launch of the Lilly Pulitzer line earlier this year.
But Target’s website did crash on Cyber Monday due to high traffic, CNBC reported, displaying a notice that said “Please hold tight. So sorry, but high traffic’s causing delays. If you wouldn’t mind holding, we’ll refresh automatically & get things going ASAP. Thank you for your patience!”
PayPal also experienced difficulties due to the increased online traffic, reporting a “major impact to its website.” Upscale retailer Neiman Marcus's website was unavailable most of Friday, according to website performance monitor Catchpoint Systems.
Other websites that have faced outages since early Thursday include L Brands's Victoria Secret and Foot Locker according to Catchpoint.
About 121 million shoppers planned to shop online on Cyber Monday, down slightly from the 126.9 million who planned to participate last year, according to the National Retail Federation.
The race to attract online shopping dollars means that retailers are going to have to bolster their investments to ensure a positive shopping experience if they don’t want to lose those customers to other, better prepared sites. Jeffrey Neuburger, a partner with the law firm Proskauer and an expert on technology, media, and advertising-related business transactions including data and security matters, told Retail Dive that retailers must closely assess their capacities in light of increased mobile and web sales.
“A lot of people have contracts in place that are multi-year contracts and they may not have looked at them to anticipate the need,” he notes. “Take the contracts out of the drawers, look at them, run some ‘what if?’ scenarios. It may cost some money, but I think that’s a better outcome than experiencing a crash on Black Friday.”
