UK parenting website Bounty planned to launch its first ever flash sale in association with Kiddicare this week. Members were promised at least 75% off products for five days, by quoting a special code. But by Monday evening Bounty was tweeting its apologies as ‘unmanageable interest levels’ had crashed the site and forced it to cancel the sale. Bob Dowson, director at Site Confidence, takes a look at what lessons we can learn from the marketing blunder.
Site Confidence, an NCC Group company specialising in web performance monitoring and load testing, has tested the Bounty site and confirmed that it remains performing slowly at 13 seconds to download 720KB @ 512Kbps.
Bounty has ignored the strategy on which its business is built. Like many online businesses, it has shrewdly used the speed and power of internet word-of-mouth to drive growth, and yet failed to recognise and prepare for the impact this can have on short-term promotions.
It’s straightforward to appreciate that poor online reliability and performance of individual websites rapidly erode brands. However, companies are often slower to recognise that customer bases composed of online networks, bloggers and forums, share information that not only causes promotions like this to snowball but also spreads their annoyance when things go wrong.
Companies engaging with flash events need to ensure that capacity does not exceed capability.
Just as a physical store will prevent excessive numbers of shoppers coming through the doors, so must an online business avoid traffic spikes it cannot cope with.
This could mean releasing a finite number of unique promotional codes, rather than one that can be shared and duplicated, and it should always include continual site capacity and performance testing, so that the company can thoroughly understand its own capabilities and prepare for fluctuations.
By Bob Dowson
Director
Site Confidence
www.SiteConfidence.com