Christmas Sales, everyone knows them to be the epitome of stressful with the massive checkout queues and packet claustrophobic shops trying to manage the heavy footfall. Shopping online during the christmas sales can allow customers to still receive the top discounts, just in the comfort and stress free environment of their own homes.
Click Frenzy was an Australian online sales initiative that was set to rival the US version ‘Cyber Monday’. The aim was to get all the discounts and sales products from all the major retailers on to the same site and to launch it for a certain period of time. Retailers would sign up to the event putting thousands of dollars into it, in the hope that they would be able to make a healthy profit through the extremely high levels of footfall that click frenzy was set to receive.
Prior to the event the retailers were allowed to throw even more money into the scheme to help with the advertising which was displayed on tv, radio, newspapers and posters. This was going to be huge.
The creators of Click Frenzy had also assured the retailers that they had gone to appropriate efforts to be able to handle the heavy footfall.
The event was launched on Tuesday the 20th of November at 7pm, and the site crashed minutes after, with registered shoppers being unable to access the discounts on offer. Some shoppers received ‘gateway errors’ others, nothing. Frustrated shoppers then decided to bypass the Click Frenzy site and shop directly through the retailers which then caused those respective sites to also crash. It was supposed to be ‘The sale to stop a nation’, instead it was the sale that stopped the internet.
Following the drama several of the retailers are demanding their money back for Click Frenzy not being able to provide them with the service they were promised. In my opinion it looks like Click Frenzy’s servers couldn’t handle the pressure. In the future they should probably take note of using a CDN to help take the weight of the footfall.
Luckily CDNify is able to offer a service that will not only allow your website to handle heavy footfall, but can also take you higher up the Google ranking system.
Make sure your website doesn’t fall being by getting started with CDNify.