The Great Holiday Crash

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 22 Nov 1999 14:00:00 -0800

The good news for Web retailers is that about 4 million U.S. households will be buying gifts online for the first time this holiday shopping season, according to Forrester Research (FORR). And of those shoppers, 1 million will be making their first-ever online purchases.

The bad news is that all those online shoppers may run smack into the same jams they hoped to bypass by avoiding the local megamall. Anticipating speed and convenience, they may instead find sites that crash or are simply unavailable.

Many Web retailers are unprepared for the coming onslaught of holiday traffic. E-commerce sites can probably expect to handle two or three times as many transactions this season as they did at this time last year. First-time holiday shoppers will have very high expectations for the online buying experience - and if they don't get what they want, they'll log off, climb in their cars and head back to the mall. Or they'll go to the competition, which is just a few clicks away. Those Web retailers struggling to manage unanticipated traffic will have to kiss that sale, and that customer, goodbye.

Web sites aspiring to play Santa this year should be taking the proper precautions to maintain around-the-clock availability. All too many Web site infrastructures have been extended well past their useful lives. Systems that worked fine when e-retailers were just spinning HTML or simple CGI interfaces have been loaded up with databases for dynamic content, user registration, maybe streaming media. That's all part of a growing e-business, but too often modifications are made haphazardly, without recognizing - or simply ignoring - the fact that the underlying infrastructures can't be extended any further.

The biggest mistake is to underestimate how much traffic a site will generate, and how much the user base can expand. One way to prepare for traffic to a site is to do what many consultants do: estimate how many hours they'll need for a project, then double or triple the estimate. That's smart, because it's in most people's nature to underestimate their workload, just as many e-commerce systems administrators underestimate the workload on their back-end systems.

Avoiding traffic-related site crashes depends on good communication between management and the systems guys. But if you talk to systems technicians, you'll hear that such cooperation is pretty rare.

Management needs to free up the bucks to make investments in load-balancing systems, redundant power supplies and other goodies - all the things that lessen the possibility of a site crash. For their part, the techies need to explain the bottom-line benefit of these backup systems, and do it in plain English.

Wise Web retailers also should ensure that if a storefront's back-end systems need a tune-up, the site doesn't need to go down. Can hardware and software be upgraded without disrupting service? Murphy's Law dictates that at the very hour you take down all or parts of your site for a system upgrade, every potential customer in the country will show up, credit card in hand, ready to spend. If they see a "please try later" sign on your storefront, your competitor gets the sale. A "hot site," where the system can resume in a different location, is a good fix for a Web retailer that stands to lose dollars while the main site is down.

Aside from the obvious capacity planning issues, the techies who manage Web retail sites should implement management solutions that can accommodate the addition of new systems, monitor usage and, ideally, be ready to take remedial action when something goes wrong.

These basic preparations are often misunderstood, overlooked or put off until later. But serious e-commerce professionals can't afford to procrastinate. If they do, they might as well celebrate the holidays right now. They won't have time to enjoy the real holiday season if they're spending it on the fire line, trying to keep their sites from crashing - and their sales from going up in smoke.

- Chris Marino is founder of Resonate, a provider of high-performance business solutions.

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The Great Holiday Crash