Comment: How to avoid Screwfix's mega-bargain online glitch

No comments

Shoppers at DIY online retailer Screwfix.com couldn’t believe their luck when the retailer – selling everything from sheds to pricey power tools – cut all its prices to £34.99 at the end of January.

Shoppers at DIY online retailer Screwfix.com couldn’t believe their luck when the retailer – selling everything from sheds to pricey power tools – cut all its prices to £34.99 on January 25th. Word of mouth meant people piled on to the site eager to snap up a bargain. One customer bought a ride on mower for under £35, usually priced at £1600.

Some customers who had arranged to pick up their purchases first thing on Friday were lucky, but others found their purchases had been cancelled and were reimbursed, as Screwfix and its parent company, Kingfisher PLC, which also owns B&Q, realized the mistake.

It does involve a bit of guesswork to figure out why this happened, but the likelihood is that it was a data validation error. No doubt there will be an intensive investigation to identify the cause, but these things are not always IT problems.

Website validation can be a real problem for retailers and their e-commerce sites. Changes to a website can cause all manner for problems and can skew the data that is visible on the site. For example, a software upgrade or patch to a system can cause anomalies within a website and not necessarily to the section that has been changed. One change of code, or even data messed up in a product manager’s spreadsheet, could have repercussions in seemingly unaffected areas of the site. Walmart had a similar issue back in October.

So how realistic is it for retailers to validate every part of their site every time a change happens? IT teams often make a call on how extensive regression testing should be – but resources dictate that it’s impossible for everything to be tested. Once a system is live, the emphasis shifts to the business users who are responsible for the data – but they usually won’t have access to the automated testing solutions their technical colleagues use.

There are strategies that can help e-commerce providers like Screwfix.com. Automated testing and validation solutions aimed at maintaining ‘business as usual’ can run thorough content checking after every update flagging up any detected glitches immediately – this means that when retailers press the button on changes, patches, or upgrades, they can go live with more confidence. And validation isn’t just carried out before the site goes live – it should be an integral and on-going part of any e-commerce website.

When problems like this occur, the fall out isn’t just having some bad high profile publicity and disgruntled customers. Investors often get spooked by IT failures and bad business practice and it can have a negative impact on a company’s share price. Making sure they have good governance in place and sound quality assurance measures is crucial for online retailers.