Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Black Friday’s largest E-tailers kept their pages loading nicely, for the most part, early on Friday (Nov. 27), with only a few chains—specifically Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Staples, Toys”R”Us, Sears, Home Depot, Victoria’s Secret and Meijer—stumbling.

AlertBot reported that Home Depot crashed for one hour and seven minutes, ending at 5:09 AM New York time, but seemed to remain stable come daybreak. This timing raised the question of whether it was merely some last minute site fixes. AlertBot also reported that the Lowe’s site was down for about seven minutes, ending at 2:39 PM New York time. Although the site did return, its page loads were quite slow.

Sears.com experienced neither outages nor severe page load slowdowns but shopping cart glitches, such as consumers placing items in their cart at one price and then finding the price had changed upon checkout. “Some people have been placing their orders and then they don’t get their confirmation E-mails,” said one customer representative at Sears.com, who asked that her name not be used. Customer service reps said they had been unable to get into the Web site’s backend systems much of the day. “The site’s been throwing out a lot of glitches,” said the Sears representative.

Site traffic monitoring service Sitemorse reported that Toys”R”Us went down at about 11:07 AM New York time on Friday for 17 minutes, while Pingdom and AlertBot detected several issues with Meijer. Pingdom reported that Meijer suffered a 22-minute outage ending at 1:14 AM, a 20-minute outage ending at 2:04 AM and a 33-minute outage ending at 2:39 AM (all New York time).

AlertBot reported Meijer’s first outage lasted 37 minutes, ending at 1:37 AM (New York time), with a second lasting 53 minutes, ending at 2:38 AM. The only cause that AlertBot reported was a generic “HTTP500 Server Script” error, which could include a wide range of server-side issues.

AlertBot also detected a 19-minute outage at Victoria’s Secret’s site, ending at 5:32 AM (New York time) on Friday.

The most significant initial glitches of Black Friday seemed to be owned by Staples and Kohl’s, though. Staples was down much of the morning, displaying a screen that said “Oops, you’re too early. Staples.com will be unavailable until 6 AM ET. Come back then and save big!”

That clearly seemed to be a deliberate shutdown, but the site went down again throughout much of the day, bizarrely displaying the same “come back after 6 AM” screen, although the 6:00 AM time had come and gone. In fact, the screen was seen in mid-afternoon and, when the site was up, page loads were quite slow.

Setting aside the post-6:00 AM glitches—which were clearly unintentional—the strategy of bringing the entire Staples site down is intriguing. Why cut off access to the entire site? Why not simply leave the site up—allowing routine sales to be processed—while keeping the Black Friday specials offline until the 6:00 AM witching hour?

Assuming it was indeed intentional—ignoring the deliciously cynical interpretation that the site had actually crashed and that the 6:00 AM slides were impromptu creations to make it look planned—the move was likely done with the idea of creating drama and suspense around Staples’ Black Friday activities, akin to what Apple does before select product launches.

But Apple—and perhaps Amazon—is a special case; it has consumers who are unusually brand-loyal. A consumer trying to visit Apple.com on an iPhone or iMac who encounters an issue is likely to return to the site in a few hours rather than visit via BlackBerry or check out Dell’s site. But consumers are rarely so loyal with other retail chains. It seems an unusual move. Then again, between midnight and 6:00 AM on Black Friday, it’s not clear that there would have been a huge number of consumers around to alienate, so it might prove to be a wash.

Staples Spokesperson Mark Crowley E-mailed a response to questions about the site staying closed until 6:00 AM, although it wasn’t overly explanatory.