Toys 'R' Us, Costco struggle on Cyber Monday

U.S. shoppers hit Web stores en masse yesterday during so-called Cyber Monday, straining the online systems of some well-known vendors such as Costco, Toys "R" Us, and Yahoo that apparently lacked the computing resources to meet the spike in demand.

Cyber Monday, the first work day after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the United States, proved an intense online shopping day, causing some sites' response times to slow to a crawl and payment systems to malfunction.

Costco, which didn't respond to a request for comment, faced major performance problems on Monday, according to separate reports from two companies that monitor Web site performance.

Gomez and Keynote separately detected significant performance degradation in Costco's Web site that made the shopping experience a torturously slow one for people in the United States.

The performance problems at Costco slowed down not only the rendering of its home page, but also processes such as searching for products and placing items on the shopping cart, said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's vice president of performance strategy.

At its worst point Monday, the Costco home page was taking almost 10 times longer than usual to load -- instead of about 3 seconds, people had to wait 32 seconds for it to render completely, Poepsel said.

A multistep process that goes from getting to the home page all the way to creating a one-item order that usually takes a combined 20 seconds, on Monday was taking about 180 seconds, with customers facing nagging delays at every step of the way, he said.

The Toys "R" Us Web site also saw a significant performance degradation Monday, although not as bad as Costco's, according to separate reports from Gomez and Keynote. Toys "R" Us didn't reply to a request for comment.

The ToysRUs Web site was up to 300 percent slower than usual at times on Monday, and page download times ranged between 30 seconds and 60 seconds between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. EST, according to Keynote.

Meanwhile, a Yahoo spokeswoman acknowledged that the flood of online shoppers caused the checkout transaction processing system of its Merchant platform to malfunction, affecting the ability of its stores -- mostly small businesses -- to close sales. According to this Yahoo status page, the problem began Monday morning and wasn't solved until almost midnight Pacific Time.

Gomez also reported that TigerDirect's Web site had performance problems on Monday and took about 24 seconds to load at its worst point. Gilbert Fiorentino, CEO of TigerDirect, acknowledged that the company's site ran into performance problems for an hour or two on Monday, but said it recovered fully and fairly quickly.

He chalked up the issue to a combination of things, including the day's overall spike in traffic and particular interest in TigerDirect's initiative to donate to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure group for fighting breast cancer. The consumer-electronics vendor launched this campaign on Friday and will run it until December 31. Despite the problems, Monday was a very good sales day, he said.