“I talked constantly with my chief tech architect and he was saying everything that could have been done, was done. So we did everything, and as we’ve seen, it worked for us.”
And more importantly, as he points out, this isn’t something you should be doing temporarily in anticipation of a burst of traffic, like Christmas. It’s something you should be doing all the time.
“This is long-term preparation for us,” he says. “We want to be able to have some media attention like a news story, or an advertising opportunity that drives traffic and have it actually work.”
It hasn’t always worked. The first time Appliances Online got some attention, it went down. “But we’ve learned from that and we’ve worked to get prepared much better,” he says.
The importance of stress-testing your network is only emphasised by Click Frenzy’s public backlash. Customers demand instant access to a website. Going down is the equivalent of a bricks-and-mortar retailer shutting its doors.
As IT firm Micro Focus pointed out this morning, research from last year showed businesses in Britain risked losing up to £36.7 billion ($A57.6b) a year if their sites fail during peak periods.
On the other side of this catastrophe are the retailers which didn’t get any traffic. While Appliances Online has a big enough presence to promote its own deals, Kate Morris at Adore Beauty received very little traffic.
“We got a reasonable amount, after we started posting deals to Facebook and so on,” she says. “But it was disappointing.”
While Morris says she only paid for a basic listing, a cautious move to hedge against such a new venture, the entire experience was a confirmation that online retail in Australia isn’t ready for these types of events.
In the United States, for instance, retailers reveal their deals several days beforehand in an attempt to weed out those who aren’t likely to buy.
For now, Morris isn’t sure whether she’ll try again next year. She says she feels sorry for the Click Frenzy team – especially after promoting the deals as the alternative to America’s Cyber Monday.
“It’s just unfortunate, especially because the experience is so public.”
