Last Wednesday, walmart.com experienced outages and sluggishness:
Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella acknowledged www.walmart.com experienced availability problems Wednesday morning, but she characterized them as "minor issues" that affected the site briefly and have since been resolved. "We confirmed that customer transactions weren't affected and the site is now up and running," she said.UPDATE: Walmart.com adopted a new software/analytics tool to help it deal with peak loads:She declined to be more specific about what caused the problem, which she described as "isolated."...
Checks by two IDG News Service service staffers in two different U.S. locations at around 3:40 p.m. and 3:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time found www.walmart.com unavailable. Several minutes later the site seemed to be working normally again.
The performance problems at www.walmart.com seem much less serious than the ones that affected Amazon's Web site Monday. Godskind said.
Sluggishness or outages at online storefronts are critical for online retailers, particularly during the holiday season, hurting not only sales volume but also customer satisfaction and confidence.
By using RealiTea to view the clickstreams that may lead to the system-unavailable messages, retailers are able to identify where the need to tweak their infrastructure to support higher traffic volumes to keep pages loading as intended, Galat says.Retailers will also use the analytics tool to monitor shopping carts and other crucial site features, he adds. The RealiTea system can be set to alert a merchant, for example, whenever 10 or more shoppers per hour abandon a shopping cart after having carted $100 worth of products.
Analysis of those customers� shopping sessions might reveal, for instance, that several of them abandoned the cart after clicking on information on inventory availability. Further analysis might then find that the inventory system itself was not properly updating product-availability information, Galat says.
Posted by Kevin on December, 11 2004 at 02:01 PM
