It’s all so predictable; festival tickets go on sale and the website crashes – more and more it’s being seen as a ‘badge of honour,’ much like a sell-out tour.
Last year, the website of one of the UK’s biggest festivals crashed just moments before tickets went on sale, and incredibly it was seen as an indication of success.
In reality, the inability to address this peak in demand head-on can be costly, damaging customer satisfaction and causing severe implications in the long term. An eCommerce site’s IT environment should never be an inhibitor; rather a cost effective way of enabling transactions.
Some sellers assume that if a product is popular enough, users will put up with any online buying experience. While some may not mind waiting an extra few seconds to purchase a prize item, others will. A one-second delay in page response is said to lead to a seven per cent drop in conversions (Shopzilla, 2013).
Online visitors care more about speed and reliability than the bells and whistles of a stunning front-end web page.
Consider this scenario, you click ‘confirm’ on a payment and instead of receiving the confirmation page, you’re presented with an ‘error’ message or nothing at all. Research commissioned by Savvis found that 60 per cent of British consumers experienced just this within the last 18 months.
More worryingly, only nine per cent thought payment had been processed, whereas 80 per cent worried their payment had been duplicated or not registered at all – “there was no way to know for sure”.
One in ten went as far as saying they ‘panicked’ when it happened.
Needless to say, making it difficult for a customer to buy something is definitely not good business. If a one-second delay in page response can lead to a seven per cent drop in conversions, you can only imagine the knock-on impact of receiving ‘error’ processing message.
Online visitors care more about speed and reliability than the bells and whistles of a stunning front-end web page. As well as being a major contributor to page abandonment, page reliability and load time is becoming a factor in search engine rankings. The good news is that even the smallest independent festival or concert promoter can compete with the big boys by delivering a speedy, reliable online experience.
Demand for festival websites is cyclical with publicity building ahead of each summer’s event, so spikes in activity need to be easily handled – and cloud services can do just that. Cloud allows capacity to be added as needed, offering the elasticity to provision just for the needs of the moment; when capacity is no longer needed and the rush subsides, capacity can be simply handed back.
Interestingly, cloud is doing for online retail what online retail has done for consumers. Cloud delivers a platform that allows retailers to gain the agility and flexibility in how platforms are deployed and scaled to support the online consumer demand. These new service models also provide benefits to the business as the high cost, headaches, and bottlenecks of purchasing infrastructure through a traditional model are eliminated.
The Cloud aligns costs with the flow of revenue and frees up your IT resources to focus on other things like aligning IT with the Business to support driving revenue. In doing so, cloud has eliminated infrastructure readiness as a characteristic of competitive differentiation and puts the focus on the business creating differentiation on the site content and creative marketing programs.
Thanks to cloud, the opportunity for online retailers has never been greater and the risk of failure has never carried bigger consequences. For years, online retailers have struggled to balance the capital expenditure of building out IT infrastructure against the risk of a poorly performing online store or worse, a site-wide outage.
Even planning for seasonal traffic spikes has, until recently, proven to be an imperfect science in which precious capital is often wasted. The advancement of cloud technology has all but erased this struggle by allowing retailers to easily deploy compute capacity as required.
Festival organisers pull out all the stops to promote the shows – signing the biggest names in music in order to create a media buzz. Preparing for the practicalities of ticket sales is much lower on their agenda and less glamorous, but solid provisioning of capacity and operational readiness of the website is equally as important in the overall consumer experience.
Internet retailing demands a web storefront that is optimised for desktop and mobile browsing, highly available, with a rapidly scalable technical infrastructure to host it.
