Our Favourite Online Stores Know How to Cope with Christmas Shoppers

There’s no doubt that online shopping in Australia has increased dramatically over the last few years. As Australian shoppers jump onto their computers during the busiest online shopping week of the year, online retailers say they are ready to take on the extra work load.

As shoppers we’re really not concerned with how the online shops work, just as long as they do. You may have heard of “servers” melting and web sites crashing from the overwhelming demand, but from a small article I read at www.news.com.au , I’ve learned that popular online shops are well prepared to take on the influx of shoppers.

As you probably know, shopping mall centres and the retailers within generally employ extra casual staff during Christmas, but when you’re an online shop it means employing the services of IT staff to make sure the web site can handle the extra tens of thousands of shoppers.

Big W have already had a server “meltdown” this year, and stores like DealsDirect have the wisdom to plan ahead to combat the Christmas rush. Executive chairman Paul Greenberg from DealsDirect.com.au said his team starts planning six months before Christmas to boost website capacity. With the popularity of DealsDirect I can understand completely.

“Our warehouse is resourced up an extra 30 people. We’ve got an extra 20 bums on seats in our call centre.”

CatchOfTheDay.com.au also reports big numbers during the festive season, over the past 4 weeks the site has broken its sales records three times over. Co-founder of BrandsExclusive.com.au Daniel Jarosch said their website last year struggled to cope with consumer traffic last Christmas and has built up the web site servers to higher capacity this year.

Not to be out done by the online retailers, the major delivery system Australia post is also trying to cope with the Christmas season with extend hours at 700 of it’s outlets around Australia, as parcel deliveries grow at 13 per cent since July when compared to the previous year. Personally though, I think Aus post aren’t coping at all! I’ve had 4 deliveries in a row say I wasn’t home (when I was, waiting) they even neglected to leave the little red letter in the mail box about the failed delivery – it appears my local courier simply doesn’t have time to stop :)

Do you know of an online store that have taken extra measures to cope with the holiday season traffic, maybe you know of a web site that’s not coping at all? Let us know.

Online Retailers Boost Website Capacity to Cope… – http://www.news.com.au/