How Your Traffic Spikes Could Turn Customers Away

Are traffic spikes causing online stores becoming a victim of their own successes? That seems to be the conclusion of a survey that Gomez, a web performance company, is touting.

Now before we add two and two together and get four, we must consider the source.  Gomez should not be considered an unbiased source and it is hardly surprising when a survey they’ve commissioned says web sites need better web performance. The results, however, contain some interesting nuggets to chew on, especially about customer expectations.

The study found that 67 percent of customers want Web sites to work no matter how high their traffic. If a customer runs into a slow site, 88 percent are less likely to return and 42 percent will spread some bad word-of-mouth.

Once you get nitty-gritty about the number of sites that are running into issues, things get iffy. According to the study, put together by Equation Research for Gomez during the 2009 Holiday season, “poor Web performance at peak times is endemic across the financial, travel and retail verticals harming both short-term revenues and long-term customer relationships.”

Endemic is quite a tough term here and seems a bit drastic considering what the results were. Only 33 percent of users of retail sites ran into poor Web performance during the Christmas season.

There are a lot of questions that are just hanging there like: Which sites were these people using? What do they consider poor Web performance? What, if any, impact does this have on the majority of users of the Web for e-commerce.

If you use Amazon, the iTunes store, Travelocity, eBay and Walmart.com, odds are you are going to rarely, if ever, run into a problem with a transaction. Of course even big sites can run into the occasional infamous problem on Black Friday. But if you are buying pecan clusters from Aunt Millie’s Cookie site which was built by her nephew using GoDaddy’s Website Tonight, then you may run into problems if there is a sudden run on her cookies.

One issue sites need to be aware of that could guard against performance issues, is awareness of who is talking about your product. If you have a product on a sleepy Web site that suddenly goes viral, that will cause servers to crash. Taking the temperature of the Web’s conversation about your product each day will trip any alarms which could lead to a frustrating (apparently) error screen.