In fact, the previous statement is much too modest. Cyber Monday is the biggest day of the year for ecommerce in the United States and beyond. As the statistics show, Cyber Monday has become a billion dollar juggernaut since 2010 – and it has only continued to grow. Last year alone, Cyber Monday was responsible for over $1.7 billion spent by online consumers in the US, a shocking 18% jump from the year before!
Since its inception in 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving has become a potential goldmine for those with an online presence. It has helped to significantly boost revenue during the Christmas period for savvy businesses that have taken advantage of using the promotion. The “cannot-be-missed” deals are important to any Cyber Monday campaign, but having the website ready to maintain consistent and fast performance with the traffic rush is absolutely critical.
An unprepared business would expect an increase in business on Cyber Monday, but overlook the fact that more visitors = more strain on the performance-side of their website. And the more strain on a website, the more it will begin to falter when it matters most.
How web performance can cause your Cyber Monday to crash
During the mad rush of consumers looking to snap up some bargain deals, your website has to be prepared for the sudden visitor increase – otherwise your Cyber Monday will crumble before your eyes.
Last year Cyber Monday website crashes cost several large companies thousands of dollars in revenue. Motorola was offering a special price on their new MotoX, but the site was not prepared for the rush of traffic it would bring. Many customers experienced a very slow website, errors showing prices without the discount, and then the website crashed entirely.
In addition to losing customers who would have otherwise purchased that weekend, Motorola also had to deal with the PR aftermath. Unhappy would-be customers and the tech media took to social media, posting tweets such as:
In an effort to mitigate the damage, Motorola CEO issued the statement:
Moral of the story? Motorola lost out on thousands of dollars of sales and lost thousands of potential new customers forever, all of which could have been avoided if load and performance testing had been performed early. If they had load tested, Motorola would have been aware of the problems, found the causes, and fixed them before real users experienced them.
While many companies didn’t see full website crashes like Motorola, the rush of traffic still led to painfully slow websites and therefore a loss in revenue. A website must not only remain up and available, but also remain fast to navigate around. Just think of the amount of pages a potential customer might have to go through on your website. Now imagine if there were delays in between each page loading. Internet users are an impatient bunch, a one second delay can cause a 7% decrease in conversions and 11% fewer page views. And 74% of people will leave a mobile site if the delay is longer than five seconds!
Clearly, ensuring your website is constantly up and stable is imperative to maximizing profits for your business this Cyber Monday. Because the last thing you want to do is miss out on the most important day of the year for ecommerce and present your competitors with an opening to snag that business.
The stakes are high; you’ve got to make sure you are suitably prepared for the rush.
LoadStorm wants to help you prepare for the storm of traffic with a Cyber Monday special. We are offering one free hour of consulting and one free load test of up to 5,000 users. Check out our Cyber Monday page to learn more and to request your free test today!