About 72 million Americans are expected to spend more than $700 million today, Cyber Monday. But a decade after e-commerce started in earnest, retailers remain unprepared, a study shows.
Ten of 30 major retailers had problems handling their Web site traffic Friday, with Web-page responses slowing between 10 and 400 percent from their pre-Black Friday performance, according to Keynote Systems, a San Mateo, Calif., company that measures Web site performance.
Keynote spokesman Shawn White said problems continued into Sunday with signs on Web sites saying, “Come back later.”
Keynote pinpointed Lowe’s home improvement stores’ Web site as one that had problems keeping up with its traffic.
Another Web-site monitor, Gomez, of Lexington, Mass., pinpointed Costco as having the most trouble of the 24 retailers it tracks that do e-commerce.
Starting at 8 a.m. Central Time this morning, a Web shopper had to wait nine times the normal time period — 180 seconds versus 20 seconds — to get to the final checkout to make a purchase at Costco’s Web site, said Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies for Gomez.
Neither Lowe’s nor Costco immediately responded to a request for comment.
Sears had momentary interruptions on its Web site Friday, but a spokesman said he was able to shop on and off during the day.
“There were intermittent issues for a few hours during the day,” the spokesman said. “We were able to get those problems fixed. We are continuing to monitor the volumes.”
Why are retailers still working to keep up with volume on their Web sites?
“User expectations are higher than ever, and the architecture of these (e-commerce) systems are complex,” Poepsel said. “Any little thing that goes wrong potentially can cause problems.”
Customers aren’t interested in explanations. Once they have a bad experience on a store’s Web site, they may abandon that retailer altogether, Poepsel said.
“It’s much more risky than it might seem” when Web shoppers cannot get what they want at a retailer’s Web site, Peopsel said.
Today’s online sales come after Friday’s start of the holiday season. ComScore Inc., an Internet research company, reported a 22 percent rise in online sales on the day after Thanksgiving versus a year ago.
Were overall sales up or down at the kickoff to the holiday season?
Researchers disagreed by issuing conflicting results.
The bottom line? More shoppers went bargain-hunting this year, but whether they spent more money than last year remains unclear.
The earliest report by Chicago-based ShopperTrak RCT gave high hopes for a brighter-than-expected retail holiday. It showed that shoppers on Friday stunned forecasters by sending sales soaring 8.3 percent at the kickoff to the holiday shopping season.
Sales on Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving that marks the start of the holiday shopping season — totaled $10.3 billion nationwide, vs. $9.5 billion on the Friday after Thanksgiving a year ago. Black Friday refers to the day when the ink on retailers’ books turns from red to black, indicating profit.
On Saturday, sales reached $6.07 billion, a 5.4 percent increase from a year ago, ShopperTrak reported. The combined total for Friday and Saturday, $16.3 billion, outpaced last year’s $15.2 billion by 7.2 percent.
Yet the National Retail Federation, which represents retailers, said Sunday that shoppers spent an average of $347.44, down 3.5 percent from a year ago’s $360.15, even though more than 47 million shoppers hit stores during the weekend, up 4.8 percent from last year.
Colder weather, bigger promotions and earlier-than-ever shopping hours won over bargain hunters early Friday, experts said. Early deals brought 14.3 percent of shoppers to stores before 4 a.m. on Friday, compared with 12.4 percent last year, the National Retail Federation’s study showed.
“We had more shoppers going after deals on Friday morning because of tough economic times,” Britt Beemer, CEO and founder of America’s Research Group, said Sunday. “Shoppers were saying, ‘If I can save $400 or $500, I need to make that effort.’ ”
He cited Wal-Mart’s $798 door-buster price on a 42-inch HDTV, $200 lower than last year.
Kathy Grannis, spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation, saw another trend: Retailers this year discounted lower-priced goods such as cell phones and digital picture frames.
Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak, a research firm that tracks sales at more than 40,000 mall-based, strip-center and electronics stores, said this weekend’s sales numbers are “exciting.”
Retail experts have predicted sales during the November and December holiday season will jump 3.6 percent to 4 percent from a year ago — which would amount to the lowest sales increase in five years.
