The Shadow
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) – All day long, a FedEx trailer sits backed up to the merchandise warehouse of Global Golf, which ships golf clubs, shoes, gifts and other accessories worldwide. At the end of each day, a truck comes to haul away the trailer crammed with packages.
Soon it will take two trailers a day as Global Golf shifts to holiday overdrive mode. For Global Golf and most online retailers, the year-end shopping frenzy began on Cyber Monday, following the post-Thanksgiving weekend sales.
The recession knocked the wind out of the retailing sector, but the $156 billion e-commerce industry is expected to keep expanding this year. Cyber Monday and the hectic month that follows until Christmas present particular challenges, mainly in the technological realm.
Some of the preparation, real-time monitoring and troubleshooting take place in the Triangle, home to ChannelAdvisor, a Morrisville company that sells software and other services to about 3,000 online vendors, including Global Golf.
Downed computers can cost millions of dollars in sales, and despite months of precautions, each year brings a new round of cyber-glitches and techno-hiccups that are the bane of risk managers and software engineers in the e-commerce sector.
ChannelAdvisor estimates that retailers that use its software would lose 61 sales for every minute the company’s computers crashed. That would represent about $13,500 in lost revenue on average, significantly more during peak times.
“Customers are pretty amped up at this time of year, and you have to be hyper-responsible to them,” Channel Advisor CEO Scot Wingo said. “For consumers, it means you can enjoy the benefits from all those online deals without having to get up at 3 a.m.”
Headaches for online retailers struck on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when Home Depot, Toys R Us, Staples and Kohl’s reported Web site glitches. Some outages lasted a few minutes, others several hours.
To create extra computer capacity, Global Golf has temporarily farmed out its memory-hogging Web site images to a third-party cloud computing operator. Global Golf’s goal is to have each of its five Web sites load within 4 seconds of a customer’s click. That’s the maximum delay impatient online shoppers will tolerate before giving up and moving to a competitor’s site.
By midmorning Monday, as customers placed their online orders, Global Golf computer servers revved up to 80 percent of capacity.
“We engineer those systems for days like today,” said Mitesh Patel, Global Golf’s chief operating officer.
Despite the recession, online sales are expected to grow 11 percent this year and 13 percent next year, according to Forrester Research, a Massachusetts technology market research firm. Online sales now represent 6 percent of all retail sales and are expected to claim a bigger share of the market.
Many online retailers didn’t wait for Cyber Monday for big sales designed to lure consumers from traditional stores. Still, nearly 100million Americans were expected to shop online Monday, up from 85 million last year, the National Retail Federation reported.
Online sales in the U.S. rose 16 percent Monday from a year ago as consumers hunted, Bloomberg News reported, citing marketing firm Core metrics. The company collects data from 500 retailers, including Petco Animal Supplies, Bath & Body Works and Office Depot.
Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer, said electronics, toys and kitchen items are among the top-selling items Monday. Digital cameras, portable navigation devices and LEGO products are also selling well, spokesman Craig Berman told Bloomberg.
Last year, Cyber Monday was the highest sales day for ChannelAdvisor customers, and judging by late afternoon data, Wingo expected Monday sales this year to exceed last year’s record. As it adds new customers and online traffic grows, ChannelAdvisor is hiring more employees and bulking up its computer power. The company spends six months preparing for the final month of the year, and it added 50 servers to handle an anticipated increase in volume.
At ChannelAdvisor’s offices, banks of computer screens report up-to-the-minute data from the computer servers that process online orders and shipments. Resembling heart monitors, the graphs showed an increase in online traffic much of the day.
“The data center is almost like a nuclear power plant,” Wingo said. “It has a backup generator, multiple air-conditioning systems, multiple power supplies and multiple Internet communications.”
By the end of the day, six of ChannelAdvisor’s servers had maxed out their capacity, requiring the company to deploy three more from its arsenal. Its networks had withstood the first day of customer onslaught – making for a low-stress day by the standards of Cyber Monday.
“Everything went pretty well,” Wingo said.
