Are websites ready for the biggest shopping day of the year?

You might have a good time on the recent Thanksgiving and BlackFriday holidays in the year 2017, also I hope might have purchased items online; even I did too. There are a few things I experienced and noticed this year that while shopping related to the website performance and the various components integration. There is one website which doesn’t have the inventory and availability sync up. Here are a few things I thought to worth share.

I understand that this is the day all retail websites will have traffic however as one of the biggest retail chains in NA this could have been mitigated to handle the traffic overflow. However, I really like the page design and the timer implementation which counts 10,9,8…1 when customer watches..lol. I believe in future a small game can be played instead of waiting (similar to Google doodle)

This story is a bit interesting. I ordered one of the product (more than $100) on their website with another item with a total worth of $250. The item was available online and able to place the order which is nice. Today I got an email that the item has been canceled from your order list…what? I called customer support and waited for 30 minutes then she explains the story on the inventory unavailability and other customers also complain about the same. Discussed nearly 45 minutes over the phone, all options tried, then finally agreed on the cancellation.

This shows that how the systems are poorly integrated and the inventory stock with online count is not in sync which is base of the retail. I hope (again hope…) this will be corrected in the future.

In Aldo, I added a shoe to the card and then “continue shopping”. Then went for check out where I got an overlay that item is not available. This experience I would say is better than above #2 where I didn’t pay at least. However this experience make me think that how all sites implement this — after adding an item to cart how much time that will be available to customer, in this case, it seems you added one item and another user added the same item with 1 stock, 2 users and the 2nd user snatch the item from first (not physically..). I have never experienced this behavior but may be a valid one and able to feel it on the high shopping day.

A lot of stories… just summarizing. What I understood that if the retailer wants to stand with competition for these high shopping days then website needs to be much scalable and well integrated considering with the mind of the user experience. After all, there are many sites which user visit only during this holiday time where traffic routes from Google and other search engines and mayn’t get the same level of traffic after the holiday. Once the customer loses the trust on the website (could be due to X technical glitch) will be difficult to gain the same confidence again. If you have any such experience on this season shopping please add in comments:)

Originally published at medium.com on November 28, 2016.

Originally published at medium.com on November 28, 2016.