Dive Brief:
- For every 30 seconds Walmart's website has downtime, the retailer stands to lose about $20,000, according to Gremlin's revenue metrics calculator of the world's largest e-commerce companies.
- Target can lose about $508,608 every hour its site, is down whereas Macy's can lose about $664,920 per hour. Aside from Amazon and Walmart, The Home Depot loses the most every hour it goes down at $868,464.
- Amazon "is an innovator" in chaos engineering, according to Gremlin, and there are high stakes if Amazon.com goes down. The company can lose $220,318 in one minute of downtime, or $13.22 million in an hour.
Dive Insight:
Retailers that faced adversity on Black Friday and Cyber Monday lost more than revenue: They lost customer trust and, even worse, they lost customers to competitors.
Lowe's experienced downtime on Black Friday, prompting some consumers to abandon their online shopping carts and fill them at the home improvement store's main competitor, The Home Depot.
J. Crew, a retailer that is already struggling, also faced website issues over the holiday weekend. Customers complained that their carts emptied and were unable to checkout, prompting the clothing retailer to extend its Black Friday sale to Cyber Monday, when another crash reportedly took place.
Anticipating failure is part of ensuring strong resilience and a faster mean time to resolution. Even Amazon had to resolve site issues on Prime Day in July reportedly caused by server scalability issues. Third-party apps on retail sites can also lead to "disturbingly slow" loading periods.
Some patience is required when shopping online, and with site-wide sales, some delays can be expected. But when lagging technology causes customers to abandon their shopping carts in favor of a competitor, uptime becomes a business-saving priority.
