An Outage Outrage

Only two of the 29 leading retail sites tracked by Keynote Competitive Research, a division of mobile and Internet test and measurement company Keynote Systems, can claim they made it through the holiday season without a single hour of outage.

The company’s Online Retail Transaction Performance Indices include outage hours as a metric in the measurement of site reliability success rate for three retail categories — apparel, books and music, and electronics.

Those two sites were Target and Barnes & Noble.

“They stand out from their peers, but what’s phenomenal is that all these other sites had at least an hour if not more—some as many as 20 — when major portions of their site (purchase paths or whatever it might be) were unusable,” says Ben Rushlo, senior manager at Keynote Competitive Research. “That’s surprising given that there’s so much focus on the online channel now, there’s so much revenue to be lost and gained online. It did surprise us that only two could pull off a flawless period.”

What’s the secret to their success? Infrastructure and internal processes certainly play a big part, Rushlo says. He also notes that companies such as Barnes & Noble, which is a Keynote customer, add to their success by being very pro-active in doing load testing, stress testing and measuring site performance.

“Internally they are very obsessed with this sort of data and use it at a high level in the organization, he says. “That’s got to help.”

Some online retailers made business decisions to ramp up traffic with special marketing promotions, even knowing that that may impair the ability of consumers to complete transactions for short periods. Amazon did some flash traffic based on having the Xbox 360 for a very low price, knowing the site was going to be hammered for certain periods but otherwise OK, Rushlo says. And while it had some issues, Amazon overall performed well on Keynote’s ratings.

Probably 80% of users knew to expect disruptions during these periods because they were coming to buy Xboxes, but the risk is alienating the customers who may just have happened to come to the site during that period for other buys.