In the lulls between bites, fumbles and family squabbles, millions of Americans shopped online on Thanksgiving. But those going to find holiday deals at Costco.com instead found issues.
The warehouse club's website was down for more than 16 hours Thursday, according to outage tracking website Down Detector. Users may have seen an onsite message, "The website is experiencing longer than average wait times."
Costco tried to make things right by extending the Thanksgiving Day deals into Black Friday, but intermittent outages followed some consumers on Friday as well. Some of the Thanksgiving Day-only online specials included $700 off an LG refrigerator, a 70-inch Vizio 4K Smart TV for $550 with free shipping, Gloria Vanderbilt jeans for $10 and a patio heater for $100 with free shipping.
The estimated cost in loss of sales for Costco on Thursday is about $11 million, according to Lovethesales.com. The retail aggregate, which works with more than 1,000 retailers, estimated that the downtime impacted 2.65 million consumers.
Overall online sales total about $4 billion on Thanksgiving, according to Adobe Analytics.
Costco wasn't the only site frustrating Thanksgiving Day shoppers. H & M's site also had a few relatively short outages on Thursday and Friday morning. Nordstrom Rack and Home Depot online customers also experienced "slow load times," according to Catchpoint digital experience monitoring.
Other major retailers have experienced web issues around Black Friday or Cyber Monday in past years, including Best Buy, Target and Macy's.
John Ewoldt • 612-673-7633
