Tracking How Many Consumers Flee During A Site Meltdown
Written by Fred J. AunFollowing a site meltdown by a major U.K. retailer this month, Internet traffic tracking firm Hitwise was able to document and make concrete what has always been assumed: Consumers abandon a retail site when it melts down faster than politicians vote for a tax cut. When Debenhams’ site suffered severely during a well-publicized late November sale, the percent of its downstream traffic that went to competing retailers jumped from 33.2 percent to 46.9 percent, according to a nicely detailed Hitwise post.
“Looking at the top individual retail Web sites that received traffic from debenhams.com last week, the biggest beneficiaries were Marks & Spencer (which accounted for 4.6 percent of downstream visits, up from 2.8 percent the previous week), Next (2.2 percent) and John Lewis (1.7 percent),” said the posting written by Hitwise Research Director Robin Goad.
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
