In the news yesterday, everyone was talking about Amazon’s poor performing website after high volume traffic came onto the site in a deluge to shop for the Prime Day deals.
Soaring Eagle Database Consultants are published authors on Amazon, this is something near and dear to us!
Many customers couldn’t complete their searches or couldn’t check out. The site became overwhelmed very quickly. Amazon hasn’t shared what caused the interruptions in their site and maybe they don’t need to tell us. I wonder if shoppers took this in stride and will come back and shop today? There are not many alternatives to this vast shopping search engine anymore. The ease of use and the ease of checking out makes this site unique and very shopper friendly.
It can be said that the EMerchant Giant may not have been fully prepared for the extent of the High Volume Traffic, or they could have been disrupted by a hacker, either way it seems people are not eager to stand in line or pause to shop these days. They want the ease to shop in a few minutes during breaks, lunch hours, swimming lessons and babies napping. As the brick and mortar shops can attest, folks want what they want now! They don’t like to hear we can ship it free to your home to be delivered next Tuesday.
Will society ever come back to a patient world and be willing to wait for that Sears Roebuck catalog to come in the mail only to have to wait for the pay check for the money to pay for it and then another month or two for delivery? Those days are gone, and retailers have been trying hard to meet our expectations but as they get better at delivery we seem to get more impatient, and more willing to go to a speedier merchant. A recent client’s analysis told them that they would NET $75k/month more per SECOND of reduced search time in customer retention and orders.
Preparing for an onslaught of customers is now the new norm. Thorough testing and prepping for this must be a part of fulfilling the promises. Sometimes all plans and prep work still leave glitches. Companies are full of humans, shoppers, moms and dads just like us; consumers should try to remember this. But companies need to prepare to deliver, and in this day and age, code and servers are often being launched before being adequately performance tested which frustrates everyone and causes stress for the IT teams. Stockholders get nervous, business managers start redoing their resumes. The cool thing though is Amazon is still up and ready to serve their customers today. The customers I am certain will come back for another try on Prime Deal Day #2.
Soaring Eagle Consulting has an upcoming webinar series designed for companies preparing for these events such as Black Friday or insurance registration deadlines. Check out our webinar page for more information.
