Online retailers buckle under Black Friday onslaught

With Black Friday 2015 well on its way to becoming the biggest online shopping day in UK history, one fifth of the Experian-IMRG's top 50 online retailers suffered from website crashes before 9 am, as an unprecedented consumer demand flooded them.

Boots, River Island and Argos where amongst the UK retailers to experience ongoing disruptions over the past 12 hours, according to the live tracker by Ampersand. The online tracker, which monitor the response times, uptime and downtime of websites, revealed that these e-tailers failed to handle the surge in traffic today and saw their websites fail as a result.

Other retailers, like Boohoo, John Lewis and House of Fraser suffered from minor disruptions throughout the day in their service, whilst websites such as M&S, Amazon and H&M have yet to be hit by an technical issues and have been running as normal.

"While it seems that Black Friday has had a surprisingly calm kick-off compared to last year’s chaos, with big retailers like Argos and Tesco already experiencing website difficulties due to high customer demand, it’s possible that pressure on the high street will climb as the day proceeds," commented Daniel Todaro, managing director of field marketing specialist Gekko.

"The potential risk of sites crashing on the most important shopping day of the year is likely to damage brand equity with shoppers. To avoid wasting time online, it’s likely that bargain hunters will resort to the convenience of heading in-store. It’s therefore crucial that in-store promoters and brand ambassadors are available to confidently assist customers as soon as they step through the shop doors, to minimise customer stress and to drive sales."