ToysRUs, Costco struggle on Cyber Monday

U.S. shoppers hit Web stores en masse yesterday during so-called Cyber Monday,
straining the online systems of some well-known vendors like Costco, ToysRUs
and Yahoo that apparently lacked the computing resources to meet the spike in
demand.

Cyber Monday, the first work day after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in
the U.S., proved an intense online shopping day, causing some sites' response
times to slow to a crawl and payment systems to malfunction.

Costco, which didn't respond to a request for comment, faced major performance
problems on Monday, according to separate reports from two companies that monitor
Web site performance.

Gomez and Keynote separately detected significant performance degradation in
Costco's Web site that
made the shopping experience a torturously slow one for people in the U.S.

The performance problems at Costco slowed down not only the rendering of its
home page, but also processes like searching for products and placing items
on the shopping cart, said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's vice president of performance
strategy.

At its worst point Monday, the Costco home page was taking almost 10 times
longer than usual to load -- instead of about 3 seconds, people had to wait
32 seconds for it to render completely, Poepsel said.

A multi-step process that goes from getting to the home page all the way to
creating a one-item order that usually takes a combined 20 seconds, on Monday
was taking about 180 seconds, with customers facing nagging delays at every
step of the way, he said.

The ToysRUs Web site
also saw a significant performance degradation Monday, although not as bad as
Costco's, according to separate reports from Gomez and Keynote. ToysRUs didn't
reply to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, a Yahoo spokeswoman acknowledged that the flood of online shoppers
caused the checkout transaction processing system of its Merchant platform to
malfunction, affecting the ability of its stores -- mostly small businesses
-- to close sales. According to this Yahoo
status page, the problem began Monday morning and wasn't solved until almost
midnight Pacific Time.

Gomez also reported that TigerDirect's Web site had performance problems on
Monday and took about 24 seconds to load at its worst point. Gilbert Fiorentino,
CEO of TigerDirect, acknowledged that the company's site
ran into performance problems for an hour or two on Monday, but said it recovered
fully and fairly quickly.

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