Costco's website crashed for several hours over Thanksgiving, and experts estimate it could have cost the retailer nearly $11 million in sales
by Mary Hanbury- Costco‘s website crashed for several hours on Thanksgiving Day, which meant that customers were unable to shop its deals online and on its app.
- According to retail aggregate LovetheSales.com, this could have cost the retailer nearly $11 million in sales. This number was determined by analyzing the number of hours that the site was down and the amount of money Costco pulls in each minute in online sales.
- A spokesperson for Costco did not immediately return Business Insider’s request for comment.
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Costco’s website crashed for several hours over Thanksgiving, and experts estimate that it could have cost the retailer as much as $11 million in sales.
According to data from outage-tracking website Down Detector, which was shared with Business Insider by retail aggregate LovetheSales.com, the website was down for at least 16.5 hours. A spokesperson for LovetheSales.com said that while some people may have been able to make purchases during this time, it would have been very minimal due to the number of problems with the site.
LovetheSales.com worked out that Costco would pull in around $11,035 in e-commerce sales per minute. A spokesperson said that this number was pulled from Costco’s end-of-year financials and adjusted to account for the busier period. This means that in this 16.5-hour time period, Costco could have potentially missed out on as much as $10.9 million worth of sales.
A spokesperson for Costco did not immediately return Business Insider’s request for comment.
Several shoppers took to Twitter to complain about the outages throughout the day on Thursday:
Around mid-morning ET on Thursday, Costco added a banner to its website alerting its online shoppers that the site was “experiencing slow response times.”
This was later updated. It currently reads: “The website is currently experiencing longer than normal response times. Please note that all Thanksgiving Day-only promotions have been extended into Friday November 29th, WHILE SUPPLIES LAST. We apologize for any inconvenience.”