On Black Friday, Sears.com was overloaded with volume and crashed. Their site began to crawl at around 9:30am until it finally succumbed to the increased traffic and went down altogether. From 10:30am - 12:30pm, Sears put up the following message.
For basically 3+ hours, Sears was losing out on thousands of potential customers due to their network not being sufficient enough to handle the load. One thing they did right was provide links to their other stores, and more importantly, to their weekly ad. They could have taken it a bit further to retain some of the customers they lost during the day and potential gain some extra ones.
If instead of just apoligizing, Sears went ahead and asked for the person’s email address in exchange for a $5 off $15 or similar type of coupon, they could have a) obtained some information about the visitor that could be used to advertise to them in the future and b) would give them incentive to not just go find the tools or discount TV the person was looking for over at Home Depot or Walmart.
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