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IT Outages Expensive for Retailers

Such disruptions cost $10 million per retailer per year, study finds.

Published

4 weeks ago

October 31, 2023

INSTORE Staff

PHOTOGRAPHY: Azam Ishaq/iStock.com

Nearly a third (31 percent) of retail/consumer respondents to a recent survey said critical business app outages cost more than $500,000 per hour. Almost a quarter (23 percent) estimated they cost their organizations more than $1 million an hour.

Such organizations reported a median annual outage cost of $9.95 million, which is notably higher than the $7.75 million annual outage cost across all industries and fifth highest overall compared to other industries.

Those are among the major findings in a just-released report from New Relic, a provider of a unified data platform for a variety of industries, including retail.

“The stakes are high,” the report notes. “If a retailer’s website goes down for 30 minutes on a high-traffic day like Cyber Monday, it could cost them millions of dollars, not to mention negatively influence a customer’s brand perception.”

While an omnichannel approach to retailing is essential these days, such businesses typically don’t have an easy way to gain visibility into their data across different sources, making it harder to observe the customer, product, or order journey across all touchpoints, the study notes.

For retailers to keep digital storefronts open and customers engaged, they are investing in observability tools that give them complete visibility into their software across complicated technology stacks. Observability tools proactively collect and visualize data, then apply intelligence so organizations not only understand the behavior of their IT ecosystems but can also detect issues immediately and quickly solve them, the New Relic study says.

Click here for more information from that work.

When There’s No Succession Plan, Call Wilkerson

Bob Wesley, owner of Robert C. Wesley Jewelers in Scottsdale, Ariz., was a third-generation jeweler. When it was time to enjoy life on the other side of the counter, he weighed his options. His lease was nearing renewal time and with no succession plan, he decided it was time to call Wilkerson. There was plenty of inventory to sell and at first, says Wesley, he thought he might try to manage a sale himself. But he’s glad he didn’t. “There’s no way I could have done this as well as Wilkerson,” he says. Wilkerson took responsibility for the entire event, with every detail — from advertising to accounting — done, dusted and managed by the Wilkerson team. “It’s the complete package,” he says of the Wilkerson method of helping jewelers to easily go on to the next phase of their lives. “There’s no way any retailer can duplicate what they’ve done.”