You cannot escape the Argos campaign to beat Black Friday with television adverts proclaiming that ‘once they’re gone they’re gone’… however in reality many people are finding the only thing gone is the chance to grab a bargain on Argos.
Here at Capacitas, Black Friday is a busy day for us; we help prevent websites from falling over during periods of peak demand such as Black Friday. This year we will be running an hourly update on this blog on our top 10 retail sites to watch. We chose 10 popular shopping websites and have been watching them ahead of Black Friday.
We took our first look on Friday, November 20. The results were interesting and did not bode well for Argos. Our data showed that the Argos web site was up less than 80% of the time. In addition, ‘page load times’, that is how quickly the web pages load for the visitors, were almost 10 seconds. We know that longer than two seconds and people are likely to give up no matter how much they love a bargain. On Black Friday this is exacerbated as there are alternative sites to hunt for bargains when a site goes down or is unresponsive.
It is embarrassing for any retailer to greet online visitors with a message saying the site is down. For Argos it must be especially frustrating as they launched their Black Friday campaign two weeks before the big day. This should have meant avoiding the big rush of shoppers crashing the website as they try to grab a deal before time runs out. Instead their website has had issues since the deals were launched with a shopping experience plagued by delays and messages like this:
On a positive note, four of our retailers; Currys, House of Fraser, John Lewis and Next were up 100% of the time and had fast page load times.
There are many reasons why a website crashes and customer traffic is just one, however it will be the major factor on Black Friday. Visit our blog over the coming week and we will provide further updates on our top 10 sites to watch as we approach Black Friday.
