Statistics, Facts and Figures: Web Performance on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

According to onvab.com CyberMonday 2012 was the biggest buying and spending day ever!

Whether you are a fan of facts and figures or find such data rather boring – statistics published on dzone.com are really interesting: http://css.dzone.com/articles/black-friday-cyber-monday-2012

Short Summary

  • Most of the shop seemed well prepared. Congratulations!
  • Big players like Amazon and Apple came in with good results and obviously did their homework.
  • Barnes & Noble should review their site really carefully: Up to 262 requests per page and about 10 seconds until a page was fully loaded – this upsets even patient customers.

Now imagine you run a retail site that doesn’t handle the increased traffic on such an important day. Without doubt this will bring revenue down big time, which leads to an upset CEO and rolling heads. Not to mention all the nasty comments on Twitter and Facebook.

But how to prepare for THE day?

Option 1

You could hire thousands of students (each of them owning a notebook, smartphone or tablet) and let them shop your site. If you want to repeat this scenario, you obviously have to pay them twice or three times or…

Option 2

You could automate common page flows using a good test automation tool and run load tests frequently, watch the trends, and really run your own BlackFriday before BlackFriday.

It´s up to you! Afraid we can’t help you with option 1…