Mobile shopping rush crashes Best Buy site on Black Friday

Booming online sales in the US on Black Friday led to the Best Buy website crashing twice on Friday.

The first crash happened on early Friday morning, though, the portal was restored in the morning when the second crash occurred around 5:30 pm on Friday. The site was however working again by Friday evening.

Best Buy spokeswoman Amy von Walter explained in a statement issued on Friday midday, "A concentrated spike in mobile traffic triggered issues that led us to slow down Bestbuy.com."

Even as early as Thursday morning, a number of media sites that tried to access Best Buy's e-commerce site experienced difficulty due to record-high levels of website traffic.

According to Channel Advisor, which monitors same-store sales for over 2,700 online retailers, as early as Thursday night Best Buy's online sales shot 16.32 per cent as against the same period in 2013.

According to analysts' projection, Black Friday online sales would generate $2.48 billion which it later lowered to $2.4 billion. The lower figure was due partly to web traffic which made consumers only compare prices online and then go to the real store to buy the items they saw on the website.

Chris Christopher, an economist with IHS Global insight said as shopping on mobile devices increased, retailers needed to make sure they could handle the load, bostonherald.com reported.

He said all these online stores, even if they had a brick-and-mortar presence, would need to get their technology right to handle the heavy traffic. He said these were things they had to work out, especially as people were connected.

BestBuy.com had put up a message saying the website was ''currently unavailable. Check back soon''. In the morning, the website - and its Black Friday bargains were not accessible for more than an hour.

A Best Buy spokesman said the first outage was due to unexpected levels of traffic from mobile devices.

Jeff Shelman spokesman for BestBuy said the site was down for a little more than an hour.

"At that point, we began increasing the amount of traffic we allowed to reach BestBuy.com," Shelman said.