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Almost Half of UK eCommerce Sites Crash During Seasonal Peaks

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

40 percent of UK retail websites experience downtime during seasonal peaks, according to a recent study by Cogeco Peer 1.

The independent study of over 100 UK eCommerce decision makers also found that 48 percent did not feel completely ready for seasonal peaks in website traffic.

58 percent of UK retailers admitted they faced page speed issues during 2016 - 2017 seasonal peaks.

“Retailers and brands are facing considerable challenges when selling online: from how to compete with the likes of Amazon and how social media is transforming shopping; to harnessing the power of automation and maintaining a uniform, effective online presence 24/7,” commented Susan Bowen, VP and GM, EMEA at Cogeco Peer 1. “The figures in the study highlight the need for UK retailers to act if they are to take full advantage of the revenue opportunities available during seasonal peak spending periods.”

Last year, a PwC and Local Data Company report found that 2,656 physical outlets closed on Britain’s high streets in the first half of the year. This was a rate of 15 stores a day, up from 14 a day during the same period in 2015. Greater London saw the biggest net drop in the country as 164 shops were lost – emphasizing that retailers need to maximize revenue during peak times, like Cyber Weekend.

Bowen continued: “Tech is an underpinning element to the success of all online retail brands today. Deciding when to make an upgrade is critical. Struggles during Easter can be a powerful indicator that this technology is creaking under the strain and holding retailers back during the biggest spending weekends of the year. It’s a tough question, but retailers all over the country need to ask themselves now, whether the tech infrastructure they are using is fit for purpose and whether it can support them through 2017’s seasonal shopping peaks."

“Brands can be as creative as they like with advertising and social media communications, but without a tech infrastructure that can meet the most strenuous demands of today’s online consumers, UK eCommerce brands will continue to miss out on these vital revenue streams,” added Bowen.

Peak holiday times such as Easter, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Boxing Day sales represented over a £7 billion boom for the British economy in 2016. Periods like this represent a considerable percentage of the overall annual revenue for retailers, so maximizing on these seasonal peaks is often the difference between making the black and sinking into the red.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Almost Half of UK eCommerce Sites Crash During Seasonal Peaks

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

40 percent of UK retail websites experience downtime during seasonal peaks, according to a recent study by Cogeco Peer 1.

The independent study of over 100 UK eCommerce decision makers also found that 48 percent did not feel completely ready for seasonal peaks in website traffic.

58 percent of UK retailers admitted they faced page speed issues during 2016 - 2017 seasonal peaks.

“Retailers and brands are facing considerable challenges when selling online: from how to compete with the likes of Amazon and how social media is transforming shopping; to harnessing the power of automation and maintaining a uniform, effective online presence 24/7,” commented Susan Bowen, VP and GM, EMEA at Cogeco Peer 1. “The figures in the study highlight the need for UK retailers to act if they are to take full advantage of the revenue opportunities available during seasonal peak spending periods.”

Last year, a PwC and Local Data Company report found that 2,656 physical outlets closed on Britain’s high streets in the first half of the year. This was a rate of 15 stores a day, up from 14 a day during the same period in 2015. Greater London saw the biggest net drop in the country as 164 shops were lost – emphasizing that retailers need to maximize revenue during peak times, like Cyber Weekend.

Bowen continued: “Tech is an underpinning element to the success of all online retail brands today. Deciding when to make an upgrade is critical. Struggles during Easter can be a powerful indicator that this technology is creaking under the strain and holding retailers back during the biggest spending weekends of the year. It’s a tough question, but retailers all over the country need to ask themselves now, whether the tech infrastructure they are using is fit for purpose and whether it can support them through 2017’s seasonal shopping peaks."

“Brands can be as creative as they like with advertising and social media communications, but without a tech infrastructure that can meet the most strenuous demands of today’s online consumers, UK eCommerce brands will continue to miss out on these vital revenue streams,” added Bowen.

Peak holiday times such as Easter, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Boxing Day sales represented over a £7 billion boom for the British economy in 2016. Periods like this represent a considerable percentage of the overall annual revenue for retailers, so maximizing on these seasonal peaks is often the difference between making the black and sinking into the red.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...