UK retailer Ebuyer.com has suffered an outage after thousands of web users attempted to bag themselves a bargain today.
The retailer has a £1 clearance sale, which started at 11am today, with thousands of gadgets, including digital cameras and laptops, reduced to just £1. Thousands of Brits attempted to access the site, which eventually resulted in Ebuyer crashing with many reporting they could not load the website.
"We received an overwhelming response, which slowed the offer page and resulted in many people being unable to access the offers," eBuyer said on its Facebook page.
"Our IT team has worked hard to rectify all issues and we are pleased to report that thousands of people have been able to take advantage of these great £1 deals. We will also continue updating the sale on a regular basis and letting people know via Facebook."
Visa Europe has predicted today (Monday November 28) will be the busiest online shopping day of the year. Dubbed Mega Monday, the credit and debit card firm expects £303 million to be spent online on Visa cards alone today, which equates to £210,000 per minute or £3,500 per second.
Visa said more than 4.8 million transactions will be processed throughout the day, or around 3,300 per minute. 1pm will be the peak period as shopper log-on during the lunch break, closely followed by a rush which is expected to kick-off at 7pm.
The site was back up by 2p, but according to Andreas Edler, managing director of hosting firm Hostway UK, a poor online experience, even if it's only down for a few hours, can be "extremely damaging as customers will simply go elsewhere to get the goods they want".
"Those retailers that fail to build in sufficient capacity or utilise the latest traffic management techniques run the risk of having an unhappy lead up to Christmas as Mega Monday could turn into Meltdown Monday," he said, which has certainly been the case for Ebuyer.com.
Furthermore, David Flower from Compuware believes there is no reason why increased traffic should cause a site to actually crash.
"Website management has developed to the point where incidents such as these can be better predicted and are easier to prepare for," he said.
Flower advised website owners to test e-commerce site before the Christmas rush to ensure a maximum capacity is understood.
"Tests will flag any problems and retailers can take steps to ensure things run smoothly when the real traffic hits. If they get their website right, they will no doubt enjoy a hugely successful December," he added.
"But it's vital retailers take steps to make this the case. If e-commerce goes wrong, it will invariably lead to frustrated customers abandoning poorly performing sites and walking into the arms of the competition."
Comments
Melvyn Burchell said: having been there from 1055am for the next hour or so I came away empty handed and very frustrated made all the worst by Ebuyer releasing such quips as just keep refreshing and it will work - which was presumably quoted by the same intelligent person that completely failed to notice the obvious issues a 10 year old could spot Obviously customer relations is not taken seriously by a company that announces the end of the offer several hours later with a picture of a smiley Well Ebuyer I will smile when I put my custom with Dabs Scan or any of the other competitor sites
Dave Berrill said: I found it even more frustrating that they were winding their customers up on facebook with these wonderous deals on monitors and the such something I would have bought several of along with some higher priced items for my business and home use I eventually got on the site at 240pm to be greated by a useless list of junk no one would want and kept refreshing through till 5pm with hit and miss success of getting on to the site not one single change in the list Shall never use them again would rather risk ebay than give that company money zero customer experience here
Mark said: Overclockers UK got my order very reliable and fast
Maccyroo said: EBuyer have seriously damaged customer relations with this blunder I tried several times to access the offer and eventually got a page that said no items were remaining It is difficult enough to filter out decent viable offers from the deluge of spam offering free and cheap things I resort to sorting sales email by known respected sources to pick out the viable salesFor a large Online retailer to treat customers this way is the last straw Not even an apology is offered when you get to the message saying no sale items left after hours of trying to access the dealsI will not be visiting their site as a prospective buyer again I hope the thousands of others who were totally disappointed will join me and vote with their browers E-Buyer links have now been removed from my favourites
Sam Reed said: I tried at 11am 1115am 1130am 12am 1pm and 330pm never able to get the page to load I tried just now and it worksbut its sold out not pleased
eBuyer no more said: Big mistake by eBuyer I was going to buy a few thousand pounds worth of Computer gear from eBuyer amp Aria todayAria got my whole order as I wasnt able to get on eBuyers site at allWill now keep well clear of eBuyer in future Whoever in their marketing dept thought this was a good idea should be sacked
ade harrison said: gave up trying to get on their website after 3 hours an unmitigated marketing disaster IMO - a few dozen happy customers 10000s unhappy