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Learning From A London Site Blowup

Written by Frank Hayes
July 7th, 2010
How does an E-tailer handle a tidal wave of customers created by a big marketing stunt? In the case of U.K. group-buying site Groupola, the answer appears to be: It doesn't. Last Friday (July 2), Groupola's Web site ground to a halt after the company offered 200 SIM-less iPhone 4s to its members for 99 pounds ($150 U.S., 80 percent less than Apple's price) and got 5 million login attempts as soon as the phones became available.

That didn't have to happen--and it shouldn't have. The whole point of a marketing stunt is to shake things up. It's supposed to bring in a lot of customers all at once. But those customers will just go away irritated if they show up and an E-tailer can't handle them. In the brick-and-mortar world, the answer is obvious: staff up with temporary salespeople. In E-Commerce, the answer turns out to be pretty much the same: rent some temporary help in the form of cloud computing.

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