Tonight’s Click Frenzy failure has shown that many retailers have a long way to go to really understanding e-commerce and the technology that enables it. While Click Frenzy itself has clearly failed to have a decent caching and content delivery strategy, it is also amazing that recently built sites such as Myer and David Jones have struggled with increased traffic today as well. But I’m glad to report (though not at all surprised) that Westfield’s site has very quick response times and is serving many customers through our checkout.

Lessons for your retail ecommerce site:

• Ensure you have a proven content delivery partner such as Akamai
• Cache aggressively on the server side with a technology like Varnish
• Load test your site, and your checkout (they WILL have different scaling needs)
• Ensure your integration partners (e.g. payment gateways etc) are capable of handling projected volumes comfortably
• Do not rely on luck, instead plan ahead