Costco’s (NASDAQ:COST) site experienced technical issues on Thanksgiving, which potentially cost the warehouse retailer millions of dollars in sales. The technical trouble led to the site being down for almost 16 hours.
Costco loses $11 million in sales on Thanksgiving
According to retail and deal site Love The Sales, the company lost an estimated $11 million in sales. The company analyzed data from the company from the time the site went down with the total online sales reported last year. Equally, Love the Sales also included other factors such a seasonality as well as traffic to arrive at the $11 million figure.
Love The Sales’ Liam Solomon indicated that they calculate how much the company makes in a day online by also factoring other things such as seasonality. Therefore on Thanksgiving Day, it is likely that the company would have recorded sales higher compared to mid-April or any other period. He stated that they consider how many sales the company could have made on the day per minute relative to how long the outage lasted. Therefore that is where they got the sales loss of $11 million.
Costco extends Thanksgiving promotion to Black Friday
Costco had promised significant discounts on TVs, Laptops and other products on Thursday. Following the outage, several angry shoppers expressed their displeasure regarding the crashing of the site. One shopper, for instance, tweeted, indicating that he had been trying to give them thousands of dollars since 10 am, but the site could not allow.
Although Costco has not responded to the issue regarding the outage, it nonetheless extended the promotion. The retailer posted an alert on its site, indicating that it was extending the Thanksgiving Day discounts to Black Friday on November 29.
However, Costco was not the only retailer that saw its site crash. Other retailers equally experienced trouble with their sites on Thanksgiving. For instance, Nordstrom Rack that promised discounts of 50% off some items, also saw its site crash. Solomon indicated that although Nordstrom Rack went down, it was not possible to calculate how the crash affected its bottom-line.
