Christmas time, mistletoe and downtime

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Christmas time, mistletoe and downtime.

For the larger retailers a successful Christmas may mean the difference between making a profit or a loss, while for smaller companies a bad Christmas could even mean going out of business come the New Year. 

Despite todays tough economic climate, online sales are still set to grow by 15% in 2009 and UK retailers risk missing out on millions of pounds worth of sales this December if their online stores arent ready for the influx of customers that analysts are predicting will turn to the internet for their festive bargain-hunting.

According to IMRG and Capgemini, a total of 13.16 billion will be spent online by British shoppers in the fourth quarter of 2008. They predict that 320 million alone will be spent online on 8th December with the peak of traffic between 1pm and 2pm.  This surge in traffic offers welcome relief to retailers looking to make the most of online sales this Christmas, but has the potential to cause major problems such as website downtime unless web traffic management solutions are in place.  Earlier this year, Sainsburys reportedly lost nearly 700,000 a day in sales when its website went down for three days, resulting in hundreds of customers purchasing their groceries from competitor websites. And only a few days ago Debenhams online store also crashed just as its three day 200m sale began.

Its not just missed sales that online retailers risk if their sites not robust enough to deal with peaks of traffic, although even if a site is down for a matter of minutes, retailers could miss out on hundreds of sales opportunities. Underperforming sites will also frustrate customers, damaging brand values and driving them to the competition.  Website downtime doesnt just prevent current transactions it can put a serious dent in future revenues as well.

This year, with shoppers hungry for discounts and less affected by brand loyalty, we can expect that customers wont hesitate to go elsewhere if they cant find what they want online or experience poor service. But with a little preparation it is possible to avoid downtime and ensure that your site is in the perfect condition to enjoy a very merry Christmas.

Know what your sites doing unless you monitor and test your site regularly (ideally automatically), it will be impossible to anticipate and avoid potential problems

Scalability you can prepare for the highs and lows of traffic by making sure that the infrastructure your website relies on is flexible to fluctuating requirements and can provide additional bandwidth when needed

Load balancing by recognising different types of requests it is possible to route them to different servers depending on available resource, ensuring that the most important requests are always dealt with as a priority and bandwidth goes where it is needed most

Caching by identifying and caching web content that is most frequently requested you can reduce the load on your back-end web servers, freeing up that resource to handle other traffic

Security make sure your site is protected from malicious attacks and that user data is kept safe, by implementing encryption and filtering technologies across your applications. Firewalls and anti-virus alone will not stop a DoS attack

So as the nights draw in and the geese get fat, take the time to assess your website and make the changes you need now, before the festive rush really begins. In these tough trading conditions retailers need to make the most of every sales opportunity, and a crashing website at the busiest time of the year wont just be for Christmas - it may well haunt you for many years to come.