Cyber Monday Traffic Soars, But Sites Labor Under the Strain

Online shoppers hit virtual stores on Monday in greater numbers than they ever have before on the Monday after Thanksgiving, but a number of leading e-commerce sites struggled to keep up with all the traffic, according to reports released on Tuesday. On so-called Cyber Monday, consumers performed 1.9 million transactions good for $104.8 million at 10 major merchant sites tracked by Chase Paymentech Pulse Index, a service of Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, a leading processor of e-commerce transactions. Those numbers represented increases of 32.5% and 40.6%, respectively, over the same day last year, according to the index. The activity on Monday–called Cyber Monday because observers have noticed in recent years that while consumers tend to do much of their in-store holiday shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, they tend to reserve their online shopping for the following Monday?represented the first time during the current holiday shopping season that sales at the 10 sites topped $100 million in a day. Nonetheless, dollar volume on the day after Thanksgiving, as well as on the weekend, rose 38% over the corresponding days in 2006, according to the index. The index points out that the average ticket on Monday, $53.60, was down from last year's $56.90, perhaps reflecting sales and other incentives merchants used to attract online shoppers. All that traffic, however, may have had a downside as some major online merchants' sites labored to keep up. Some sites, most particularly those of multichannel retailers with less time online, suffered severe slowdowns even in critical operations such as checkout, according to Keynote Systems Inc., San Mateo, Calif., which tracks Web site performance. All told, 10 out of 30 sites Keynote tracks sustained what the company calls “significant slowdowns” on Monday. Checkout page transactions “on a number of leading retail sites” took up to two minutes to process even on high-speed links, compared to the one or two seconds consumers expect, Keynote says. In particular, Toys 'R” Us sustained slowdowns of as much as 300% during the afternoon on Monday, Keynote says, while at Costco the time to log on, add items to a shopping cart, and perform a purchase slowed by as much as 500% during much of the day. J Crew experienced slowdowns comparable to those of Toys “R” Us, according to Keynote. But the online stores of Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Dell, and Overstock.com “performed very well,” the monitoring service says. Slowdowns of as much as 400% will induce consumers to abandon a product search or transaction, Keynote cautions. Keynote tracks 30 retail sites in the apparel, books and music, and electronics categories. Such problems may only grow worse next month, when traffic is expected to peak for the holidays. Online transaction volumes in mid-December will “significantly surpass” the record highs reached on Cyber Monday, according to the Chase Paymentech Pulse Index.