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Sainsbury’s website downtime analysis
June 19, 2008
Yesterday the BBC reported that Sainsbury’s had suspended its online grocery store, and looking at the site this morning that still seems to be the case. One of the great things about Hitwise’s daily data is that we are able to track the impact of such changes in almost real time. The chart below illustrates daily internet visits to two Sainsbury’s websites this year – the main homepage and grocery site.
This example seems to prove that there is indeed such a thing as bad publicity. The media coverage has clearly had an impact: the Sainsbury’s story was one of the most read on the BBC News website yesterday, and news.bbc.co.uk was the third ranked site sending traffic to www.sainsbury.co.uk as a result. Consequently the homepage experienced a surge in traffic (although average visits time fell to a six week low), but at the same time the grocery-specific site saw its traffic decline by a similar amount.
Perhaps even more worrying for Sainsbury’s, the top downstream site visited after their homepage yesterday was Tesco. As the table below illustrates, 8.36% of people visiting the supermarket yesterday went to its arch-rival afterwards, while a further 1.38% went to Asda
Of course, you would expect some traffic like this between competitors in the supermarket sector, but in this case it is clear that Sainsbury’s is suffering higher than average ‘leakage’ to its competitors. The table below illustrates the same downstream traffic from Sainsbury’s, but for last week rather than yesterday. It usually only sends 1.66% of its downstream traffic to Tesco, not 8.36%, while Asda doesn’t even appear in the top 20. It’s also noticeable that amount of traffic Sainsbury’s sent to its other stores fell yesterday as a result of the downtime.
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 AM
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In Categories Food | News and Media | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds
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Comments
Kevin - good point. It looks like the reason that the /groceries domain has fallen down almost to zero is because there is a re-direct to a temporary service unavailable page here:
http://www.sainsburys.com/serviceUnavailable/index.html
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | June 19, 2008 12:26 PM
Robin
It's sort of obvious that Sainsbury's would leak traffic to competitors (people need food!) but interesting to see the figures.
What I'm wondering is how you've measured that downturn to the groceries site? There's an obvious increase in traffic to the main homepage and one outcome could be a corresponding increase to the grocery site. Given the wide publicity I expect a lot of people would have wanted to see the site in it's offline state (a nice picture of lemons). Are you measuring the /groceries page or the page it redirects to?
Posted by KLewis | June 19, 2008 12:08 PM