What You Can Learn From Target's Site Crash

The Fallout
Credit Target's marketing and merchandising teams for generating the hype that drove the demand for Misonni. Were their efforts wasted when Target.com went sideways for two days? A better question might be, what damage was done on sales as a whole during that time?

What drives the financial impact of a site outage is abandonment. It’s important to understand that website problems visitors experience won’t exactly result in lost revenue. It's only when those visitors don’t return that revenue is lost. In web load testing parlance, a shopper’s tolerance for errors is called “tenacity.” Low-tenacity shoppers bail from slow searches and abandon shopping carts in a dash. Missoni brandistas, however, were very high-tenacity shoppers. They kept trying to buy despite the errors, which also likely contributed to the outage’s long duration.