Argos web crash proves retailers are still not ready for customer shopping peaks
Argos’ colossal website crash last week should prove to be a warning to those retailers who still can’t cater to the peaks and troughs of customer shopping habits.
With Black Friday just two months away, Argos experienced yet another major website crash when a pricing error on an Xbox One games console went viral after a bargain finding firm shared the link on their 60,000 strong facebook page.
Due to a pricing error, the usually £300+ console was marked at £89.99, resulting in thousands of bargain hunters flooding the site. The retail giant failed to cater to the immense, concentrated shopping spree, despite having had technical issues in times of peak customer shopping in previous years.
The changing of the seasons sees the retail calendar heating up with Halloween, Black Friday and Christmas just around the corner, and with some online retailers generating 10% of their revenue during the Black Friday Peak, now is not the time for organisations to be underprepared for concentrated shopping activity.
Argos’ repeated failure to cater to its online customers’ demands can only be a warning to those retailers who have still not made steps to improve their online offering. Black Friday simply represents what has become the norm in retail; intense peaks and troughs of customer spending throughout the year, and so it’s time to talk about a new breed of eCommerce.
For those retailers who want to truly weather the tumultuous retail landscape, sustainable growth and availability depends on having an ecommerce solution that can deliver real scale by managing both unpredictable demand and multi-territory trading. A distributed solution in the cloud will bring the platform closer to customers in all markets, simultaneously reducing loading speeds and adding elastic scalability to smooth out the peaks in the retail calendar.
It is surprising that Argos has not learnt from previous years’ mistakes, however that doesn’t mean other retailers have to suffer the same technical issues. Taking ecommerce to the cloud can result in high availability, low latency and infinite scale – a winning combination for those retailers with real ambition to stay ahead of the curve during prime shopping periods.
