Sainsbury’s web site struggles to cope with Christmas demand

The supermarket giant Sainsbury's web site has struggled to cope with an increase in demand in the run-up to the Christmas period according to statistics from internet monitoring firm Keynote Systems.

Keynote Systems found that on Friday 2 December, 58 per cent of the site's visitors could not fully load the Christmas page, and that it took an average of 46.10 seconds to load.

Between the 30 November and 7 December, the monitoring firm said that Sainsbury's' web site took longer to load on average than any of its competitors, apart from Asda.

Robert Castle, Keynote Systems solutions consultant explained that the Christmas page had more elements than any of its competitors' web sites and therefore took longer to load. He said that this could have forced them to purchase services from a competitor.

"Sainsbury's Christmas page has the most elements to load meaning if there is an issue with one of these, it can disrupt performance and dramatically slow the site.

"However, it's surprising that the Sainsbury's page was suffering such severe outages for such a long period of time on Friday.

"As lots of online retailers have created bespoke Christmas pages and offers, it's unlikely that customers will continue to try to complete a transaction with one retailer if they're struggling to access the site," he said.

In response, a Sainsbury's spokesperson said: "We experienced some technical issues with our online groceries web site. A small number of customers were affected and we have apologised for the inconvenience caused. The web site is up and running again and we are working hard to ensure that it does not happen again."

However, the supermarket chain did not give any detail on how they would try to rectify the problem.