Last week itbusiness.ca did a piece on the holiday rush for Canadian online retailers (http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=37853&cid=9).  Some interesting tidbits:

Sears's online sales last year accounted for between $150 to 200 million out of the company's $6.2 billion total revenue.

Sears.ca was ranked as the No. 1 online retailer by Canadians who shop online, with 41 per cent of respondents indicating they plan on purchasing from the department store’s Web site. Futureshop.ca followed closely behind with 40 per cent. Indigo.ca, Amazon.ca and Canadiantire.ca rounded out the top five.

I imagine that a lot of Sears' online shoppers use the web site to simply order things from the catalogue rather than calling in their orders.  The web site is not great for browsing and discovery (certainly not nearly as compelling as flipping through the Wish Book).

As an Internet guy living in Canada, it is perhaps a tad depressing to see how small a sliver of Sears Canada's revenue came from online sales and then to realize that Sears.ca is the number 1 online retailer in Canada (in at least one survey).  And the web farm handling all that Canadian ecommerce traffic?  Just four boxes:

Sears Canada, for example, adds an additional two servers onto its existing two to handle the extra load placed on them during the fourth quarter. The fourth acts as an emergency server.

I'm guessing they're running something better than PowerEdge 850s over there...

By contrast, sportcheck.ca (also mentioned in the article) seems to have been caught with its Columbia/Burton snowboarding pants down this year.  They have had a "holiday season traffic, slow webpage loading, sorry" message up for at least a week!  And they don't even sell products online - it's just a catalogue.  Too bad.  There's probably some IT guy over there being dragged over the coals even though he warned his boss that this would happen...

Although the message and slow load time is bad enough, the site was not loading at all when I tried it earlier today.  It would serve a blank HTML page 50% of the time.  Not good for stickiness.

(Addendum:  A Sears package was delivered while I was writing this.  They are watching.  Beware.) 

  Disclaimer  |   |