Online retailers urged to encourage queuing over crashing this Black Friday
Ahead of Black Friday, research from TrafficDefender has revealed that 86% of consumers would rather queue to buy a product online than have a website crash.
The research also found that nearly half of consumers have missed out on buying a product because of a website crashing during a sale event such as Black Friday, but 47% would have been prepared to wait more than three minutes if there had been a queuing system in place.
With British consumers expected to spend £12,384 every second online during Black Friday, retailers cannot afford to have a website crash. As such, TrafficDefender, the leading web traffic management and queuing system from IT performance expert, Intechnica, has added a raft of new functionality and updates to its core offering ahead of the busiest shopping day of the year.
TrafficDefender ensures websites continue to function even when the volume of traffic hitting the website is exceeding the levels that the infrastructure can normally handle.
TrafficDefender works alongside a website’s existing capacity management to divert any excess visitors to a first in, first out queue whilst the site in question deals with as many visitors as it is actually capable of handling. The new updates include VIP prioritisation, real-time analytics and dashboards on customer experience, and the ability to block unwanted traffic, such as bots and scrapers.
Jeremy Gidlow, CEO of TrafficDefender’s parent brand, Intechnica, said: “Needless to say, besides the threat of losing out on millions of sales, it’s embarrassing for a retailer to have its website go down. Our recent research revealed that almost nine out of ten of consumers would rather queue to buy a product on a website than have the website completely crash.
“TrafficDefender averts disasters like this by automatically directing any overflow of visitors into a queue. This will be incredibly important on days like Black Friday as it prevents any critical performance issues so that existing visitors can remain on the website as normal, and queuing customers will be informed of their expected waiting time, thus improving the customer experience.”
This Black Friday, TrafficDefender will be monitoring 115 of the top retailer’s websites on both desktop and mobile to see which are running, crashing or queuing. This will be presented on the TrafficDefender online league table. Performance management experts will be commenting throughout the day on those succeeding in Black Friday Heaven, as well as those suffering in Black Friday Hell.