Retailers Brace Themselves for Cyber Monday – Eight Seconds to Success or Failure

Twelve months of strategic planning, product positioning and millions of dollars in advertising can all be lost in the space of just eight seconds-- and those eight seconds make some of the nation’s largest retailers very nervous as Cyber Monday approaches.  

“Eight seconds is about the longest most consumers will wait for a Web page to load,” says Steve Gruetter, director of Platform Lab, the non-profit IT test lab that, among other lines of business, provides stress and load testing services and infrastructure to help retailers get ready for Cyber Monday.   “They’ll be aggravated if  they have to wait that long, but they will give it eight seconds before they move on.”

And this can have implications far beyond a lost transaction.  According to a survey recently conducted by Sterling Commerce and Demandware, Inc., almost a third of respondents said that a negative experience online leaves them with a negative impression of the retailer overall.

Platform Lab has been providing load and stress testing services for retailers since 2005. That is the year the term Cyber Monday was first coined to describe the Monday after Thanksgiving when retailers offer deep discounts to online shoppers. 

What Gruetter observed differently about 2010 is the uptick in testing Platform Lab has been asked to perform.   “We’ve seen more retailers coming to us for testing.  They’re performing more tests and are testing for a larger number of concurrent users than ever before.” 

The two main metrics retailers test for are concurrent users (the number of users that can be on the site simultaneously) and the number of page views that can be served up per hour. 

“Prior to this year, we had only one client ask us to test for more than 50,000 concurrent users.  This year, we’ve run 16 tests for more than 50,000,” says Gruetter. 

Gruetter also says the number of tests performed in advance of Cyber Monday nearly doubled this year from 26 in 2009 to 51 in 2010.

This concurs with trends being predicted by the National Retail Federation’s digital division, Shop.org, which reports nearly 84 percent of online retailers plan to have a Cyber Monday promotion.  This is up from 72 percent in 2009 when 96.5 million Americans spent $733 million online on Cyber Monday.

Platform Lab has been working with one retailer who has been preparing for Cyber Monday since June of this year.  “Smart marketers understand the significance of their one-shot on Cyber Monday and are putting the tools in place to make the most of this seasonal opportunity.” 

Gruetter says another factor contributing to the increase in testing this year may also be because of an emergence of a number of new, more affordable testing tools – ones that can cost anywhere from 75 to 95 percent less than what traditional testing tools have cost in the past. 

“We’re seeing an influx of very flexible, very affordable, Web-based testing and monitoring tools from companies such as Neoload, NRG AppLoader, Open Demand, Reflective and others,” says Gruetter.  “Combining these next-generation load test alternatives with the cost-effective environments Platform Lab can provide as a non-profit testing facility, makes multiple and thorough testing more feasible for all retailers – not just the ones with giant IT budgets.”  

For more information on Platform Lab, visit www.platformlab.org
Click here for more information on the NRF’s Digital Division.
Click here for details of the Sterling Commerce study.