Retailers Turn to ’CloudTesting’ to Avoid an E-commerce Crash

In September 2011, the launch of a highly anticipated collection by Italian brand Missoni for big-box retailer Target drew so much Web traffic, the retail giant’s website crashed and remained down for three hours.

Fast-fashion retailer H&M saw the same thing happen last November when it launched a capsule collection with Versace.

In both instances, limited quantities, plenty of pre-sale marketing and the chance to buy designer goods at fast-fashion prices fueled the frenzy. But with more consumers shopping online, even seasonal demand can threaten a retailer’s website.

Last year, retail sales over Thanksgiving weekend set a new record with sales up from $45 billion to $52 billion, according to the National Retail Federation. ShopperTrak, a data firm that makes sales projections based on foot traffic, expects holiday retail sales to be on par with last year, when e-commerce sales rose
15 percent, according to comScore.

Retailers Amazon.com and Wal-Mart were prepared for last year’s e-commerce crush after having their Web performance tested in advance by e-commerce software provider Soasta Inc. Soasta tested the website performance of six of the top 10 U.S. retailers, including Amazon and Wal-Mart, two of the four highest-traffic sites, according to comScore.

Facebook, Pinterest and e-commerce stores of all stripes made sure their online presence could handle the millions of people who visit their sites on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and every day in between.

Called “CloudTesting,” Soasta’s platform has been used by NASA for the Mars Curiosity mission, as well as at the most recent Olympics in London.

Before contracting with Soasta, department-store retailer Dillard’s had previously conducted all load and performance testing in its test environment and had experienced performance issues during critical retail events.

Last year, Dillard’s sought out the root cause of the performance issues. Soasta conducted low-volume tests and generated a relatively low number of orders.

Once these low-volume tests proved successful, larger tests were conducted to reach the page-view-per-hour benchmarks Dillard’s had set as targets. In the end, Dillard’s experienced its best online retail event ever.

“Soasta CloudTest is ideally suited to test consumer-facing websites” said Tom Lounibos, Soasta chief executive officer. “Many of our customers have leveraged the best practices to prepare their production sites for the holiday traffic while protecting the experience of current online users.”