Online retailers geared for Black Friday

WILL the “glitch” steal Christmas for online shoppers this Black Friday?

No‚ say South African online retailers‚ who claim they are ready to fend off system overloads and crashes when thousands of shoppers look for bargains on November 24.

Last year, shoppers using Takealot.com ran into problems in the checkout process.

This year the online retail giant says it has prepared for five times the average traffic.

“Our checkout process ran into problems on last year’s Black Friday because the banks’ payment gateway fell over from the surge of online shoppers across the country.

“The combination of all the retailers running Black Friday sales meant that they simply couldn’t handle the volume of transactions – and we believe we’ve done everything we can to mitigate these challenges this year‚” said Takealot.com chief marketing officer JulieAnne Walsh.

Fashion retailer Zando.co.za has implemented a “feature freeze” to tackle any possible glitches.

“We have spent the last few weeks in the lead-up to Black Friday preparing our systems, which entailed a ‘feature freeze’‚ meaning we have not developed or deployed any new features but instead spent the time on scaling and creating a robust website that will ensure we manage the increased load of Black Friday‚” said Zando. managing director Grant Brown.

Spree’s Black Friday traffic and order volumes have grown by 100% per annum over the last four years.

Last year, it was one of the few e-commerce sites that managed visitor load.

South Africa’s only digital credit product for online shopping‚ Mobicred‚ says its system was built to specifically cater for increased traffic.

“Although last year there were many merchant sites that crashed‚ we have designed our systems to handle large volumes,” founder Jason Sive said. — DDC