When surveyed, a staggering 88% of respondents in the United Kingdom said they will spend more online this year than they ever have before. Just over half said they actually found it easier to shop for Christmas gifts online compared to physically going to the shops in one of Britains high streets. PEER 1 Hosting has warned many online retailers could be under prepared for the demand on their servers as the survey also showed that almost 40% of people will leave their shopping until December, which will cause huge increases in traffic.
Sites that are ill prepared for high volumes of traffic will fail at this time, likely costing a huge amount of lost revenue. With the potential to purchase goods from various outlets, if one site fails consumers are most likely to purchase the wanted item elsewhere.
Retailers need to be ready this year for Christmas, and cope with big spikes in activity – slow page loading times or site crashes mean lost customers, said Dominic Monkhouse, UK MD at PEER 1 Hosting. Its business critical for ecommerce sites to continue to perform at their optimum rate at the busiest time of the year, and working with a scalable hosting provider means theres no need to invest in a lot of extra capacity that wont be needed for the majority of the year.