What You Can Learn From Target's Site Crash
While Target’s outage didn’t deter some of the Missoni faithful from eventually returning to place orders on another day, the real financial impact was to the other product category sales that couldn’t take place during that time. The iPad shopper went to one of Target’s competitors instead, for example. According to Nielsen NetRatings, for every 1,000 electronics shoppers that experience three errors, the cost to the site is nearly $100,000. Target's website averages 1.3 million visitors a day this time of year, therefore it presented repeated errors to over 1.2 million consumers on Sept. 13. You can start to get a sense of how that adds up.
Web Load Testing Prevents Outages
The only way to prevent events like this from happening is to perform realistic web load tests that prepare for these scenarios. In this case, Target claims to have prepared for the kind of traffic it typically experiences on Black Friday — i.e., a buildup over the course of the day. Clearly this wasn't the realistic scenario to prepare for. The Missoni line became available at a certain time and day, akin to a ticketing merchant where a concert sells out within minutes of its availability. Target didn't expect the suddenness of the demand surge.
Realistic web load tests model site usage and shopper behavior. Systems are deployed to simulate high levels of demand from multiple geographically disperse areas. Once the load is generated, the infrastructure and application’s response are watched carefully to identify bottlenecks and breakage points as the entire mesh of the website’s interconnecting parts are stressed. Only this level of testing can accurately inform e-commerce teams of their preparation adequacy.
Aaron Rudger is senior marketing manager for web performance at Keynote Systems, a provider of on-demand test and measurement products for mobile communications and internet performance. Aaron can be reached at arudger@keynote.com.
