Businesses in the UK risk losing up to £36.7 billion in revenue per year if their websites fail during peak periods, according to UK tech firm Micro Focus. A report by the enterprise application solutions provider, and the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR), found that nearly £100 million of British e-commerce revenue was lost due to outages and crashes last year.

Micro Focus says the UK’s e-commerce industry is worth £320 billion per year and growing at an unprecedented rate of 20 per cent year-on-year. And they believe the market is likely to grow even faster in the next 10 years, as Smartphone usage fuels more online transactions.

David Valentine, general manager at Micro Focus, comments: “As a result of website failures, almost £100 million of e-commerce revenue is already lost every year. If businesses don’t ensure their e-commerce applications can handle the extra loads experienced during peak times, such as July and the run-up to Christmas, the cost could reach £36.7billion.

“Businesses must not only protect against this potential loss of revenue in the short term, but also protect their brand and reputation in the longer term by ensuring a better customer experience. Making sure that websites and the applications that run on them are tested for the highest volume of anticipated users has traditionally been expensive and difficult to manage but new, scalable cloud-based testing services make this much more cost-effective.”

Ensuring that e-commerce sites can withstand peak loads is a challenge because traffic can vary from 5,000 transactions per hour at normal times to 50,000 during a promotion or peak period. Online ticket retailers are particularly susceptible to fluctuations in demand, as demonstrated by recent website failures for the London 2012 Olympics and Ticketmaster.co.uk.

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