Are Sears.com and Kmart.com 'œBlack Friday-ready'?

Sunday, 30 November 2008 18:00

One would imagine that Sears and Kmart have learned the hard way that having their websites down on Black Friday leads to devastating losses in sales. Especially this year with the glooming recession knocking on every door and when every customer is more precious than ever, with forecasted sales down over 10%.

WebSitePulse.com detected that Sears.com and Kmart.com were down for more than 7 hours on Black Friday last year, and today they are down again for almost 2 1/2 hours.

This poses the question how much sales have “walked away” from the leading retailers this year and are they ready for the forthcoming Cyber Monday? Shop.org is predicting that more than half of U.S. office workers with Web access will be shopping from their desks. And on the Internet it takes only few seconds for the customer to change their mind and move to the next best deal on a website that is "Black Friday-ready".

BestBuy.com also experiences some problems with their checkout process. Again, more than 50% of our test transactions which are performed every 15 minutes from 3 US cities fail at checkout.