A report said a staggering 92 percent of the top shops in the UK didn’t take advantage of so-called “Cyber Monday”.
“Cyber Monday” is a spinner’s term for last Monday, which was expected to be the peak time when people ordered kit over the internet.
But, according to the NCC Group, it all went terribly wrong, mostly because of slow download speeds.
It said it monitored the top retail websites last Monday and didn’t reach an average download speed of three seconds or less.
Why? According to Bow Dowson, director of NCC Group’s website performance group, for some weight of traffic was probably a problem. One site it monitored on the day was 50 percent slower than the average download speed over the previous three months.
He said: “You could argue that the availability of good load testing solutions makes traffic-induced performance problems unforgivable these days. However, a number of companies performed badly this year, and that might be down to the extra hype we’ve seen around Cyber Monday meaning an even greater surge in visitors.
“What’s more, a lot of retailers have been advertising Cyber Monday discounts. A closer look at some of the special promotion pages from Friday to Monday also revealed that prospective customers would have been experiencing even longer load times or timeouts at certain times of day.
“It’s also important to remember that poor performance can be caused by third-party plugins and widgets. These are also under greater strain at this time of year, and it’s difficult to factor in the effect of elements over which you have no direct control.”
The NCC Group did not name names.
