Monday 28th November is predicted to be the busiest day of online retail trading of the year. Dubbed “Mega Monday” in the UK, or “Cyber Monday” in the US, it falls on the Monday following the Thanksgiving celebration. This online shopping phenomenon is driven by Americans returning to work and buying items that they’ve seen advertised over the holiday weekend. As a result, many online retailers put campaigns and incentives in place in the run up to Cyber Monday and this has led to European and UK sales also being boosted at this time.
Last year, according to the Interactive Media in Retail Group (
IMRG), British shoppers spent
£831,000 online in a single minute on Mega Monday.
According to IMRG, the UK is the largest e-tail economy in Europe, with 37 million British people regularly shopping online. In fact the peak trading from Mega Monday stretches into Monday 5th December, when most people have received their last payslip before Christmas and start their online shopping in earnest.
To support all these real-time transactions requires a robust server infrastructure offering high availability, backed up by good bandwidth.
Witness the disruption caused on 4th November 2011, when a mainframe at HSBC failed, preventing customers from accessing online accounts, or being able to use debit cards or ATMs for 12 hours. Just 24 hours later, after a major IT system update, RBS suffered an outage that locked customers out of their online accounts over the weekend.
Even if a site doesn’t go down completely, a delay in page loading can impact user experience and damage online trade. According to Site Confidence, last year during Mega Monday’s peak trading periods, some e-tail sites slowed to a crawl, with web pages taking up to 24 seconds to load. This delay caused some customers to abandon their shopping carts and surf to competitors’ websites.
If this happens, the impacted retailer may not gain any return on their investment in promotional activity in the run up to Mega Monday.
Poor preparation and testing of data centre infrastructure can lead to degraded end-user experience when Web servers come under heavy load. To prevent this type of system failure, during the current peak online trading period, data centre operators need to apply close monitoring to transaction application performance. They must also have failover and incident response plans.
We advise ongoing application performance management (APM), to help retailers avoid the situation where traditional infrastructure monitoring tools are reporting that applications are running normally, but users are complaining of slow web page refreshes, or simply abandoning carts. Using application performance monitoring tools that deliver end-to-end visibility of your current environment, your organisation can quickly isolate fault domains and identify the true cause of application performance issues, down to component level. This helps shave valuable minutes off your mean time to recovery, so that sales and brand reputation are not impacted during peak trading periods.
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