What You Can Learn From Target's Site Crash
When Target made headlines with the launch of its limited partnership with designer Missoni, it probably didn’t expect demand for the fashion line to crash its website. While we usually hear about retail website crashes on or near Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Target’s recent site outage is remarkable for its atypical timing, severity and length.
Careful investigation into the origins and impact of the incident reveal important lessons for all online retailers. Ultimately, failing to prepare for an incident like this isn't an option for merchants striving for success in today’s connected consumer market.
What Happened?
Keynote Systems’ measurements of Target’s website indicated that traffic began overwhelming the retailer's site around 8:00 a.m. EDT. The intense wave of traffic initially resulted in server errors. Target's operations team quickly responded by serving friendly error messages around 8:14 a.m. After that, only about 7 percent of visitors were able to successfully reach Target's homepage throughout the remainder of the day. “Fail puppy” error pages were still being measured by Keynote well into the following day.
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.
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.
