TrafficDefender, a web traffic management and queuing system from Intechnica, has been monitoring 115 of the top UK online retailers over its online leaderboard.
Jeremy Gidlow, CEO of TrafficDefender’s parent brand, Intechnica, said: “After the chaos experienced during the Black Friday sales that happened in stores last year, many shoppers have opted to stay indoors this year. As a result, most retailers have witnessed an unusually large surge in online traffic as consumers shop online.
“It appears River Island was unavailable shortly after their deals went live due to the unprecedented volumes of website traffic, but it quickly recovered. Even top retailer John Lewis has recently suffered unavailability during surges of traffic.
“However, many websites have implemented queuing systems to help manage the influx of traffic. Tesco’s website began to queue people during the early hours of today. Other retailers such as Argos have been able to stay online and trading thanks to the use of a queue.
“It seems queuing online is much preferable to queuing in store this year. Recent research by TrafficDefender revealed that 86 per cent of consumers would rather queue to buy a product on a website than have the website completely crash. The research also found that nearly half of consumers have missed out on buying a product because of a website crashing in a sale event such as Black Friday, but 47 per cent would have been prepared to wait more than three minutes if there had been a queuing system in place.”
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