Alza.cz’s Downtime Might Have Cost the Company Over Half a Million Dollars
Website monitoring could help you prevent a loss of revenue and customers.
Alza is one of the largest retailers in the Czech Repubic, a major player in everything electronic and related to household appliances. With a market of 10 million people, Alza is also one of the biggest e-shops in the country.
So when their website went down for eight hours between 4 pm and midnight on June 1st, 2016, the online retailer took a big financial hit. Based on Alza’s reported earnings of 14,500,000,000 CZK per year (the equivalent to over 600 million dollars), the eight-hour outage could have cost Alza as much as 13,232,945 CZK or a little over half a million dollars.
Those numbers don’t take into consideration the potential loss of future customers, the losses in SEO returns, and the effect of downtime on paid search ads and advertising.
Testomato first caught that Alza’s website was down seconds after it happened:
As we tracked the uptime of the site during the following few hours, we noticed that, while Alza was again up and running after midnight, it was still experiencing problems with connections. This included a slowdown when first opening the website in a browser and the SSL connection is being performed.
The fluctuations in connection time, response time, and website speed continued throughout the morning. This was especially evident after 6 am, when morning traffic started to increase:
Then, the website experienced another full outage between 11:41:09 and 11:47:34. This is what Testomato could see when the outage happened:
The moral of the story? Monitoring your website for errors and uptime can alert you early on if your server is down so you can take action and prevent losses.
