Nigeria’s major ecommerce platform, Konga.com, has said that the unprecedented traffic surge resulting from the roll out of its “Baddest Sale Ever Liveth” campaign crashed its website despite several upgrades it carried out in anticipation of the expected traffic.
“We rolled out a Baddest Sale Ever Liveth campaign on Social media, blogs, Radio, TV and every other platform available. We announced the time of the sale as 9am on Friday Nov 29, 2013, upgraded our servers waiting for Nigerians to come and when the time came, Nigerians did not just come; they came at us with everything they had,” the company said in a statement.
It added: “The Konga.com website experienced a traffic surge unprecedented in Nigerian online shopping history and our website crashed, but our team did not give up, we promised Nigerians the Baddest Sale Ever Liveth and we kept pushing till we delivered it.”
In an exclusive chat, the company’s public relations strategist, Ifeanyi Abraham, said the company recorded an unprecedented traffic during the campaign.
“Every platform comes prepared for a certain capacity, and Konga is one of the top 20 most visited websites in Nigeria, so I can tell you that the traffic we received that day is much higher than any traffic we have ever received/traffic normally recorded by top websites n Nigeria. At that point every possible medium (mobile and desktop) received its highest number ever,” he said.
He said the incidence depicts what could when customers come en masse.
He said: “The beautiful thing about what happened is that it has given us much more insight into the possibilities that exist when customers come en masse to shop and we nw have a standby capacity of more than three times the normal server need to maintain a fast and easy shopping experience.”
On the best selling products, he said it cuts across various categories.
“We had a crazy price reduction in our mobile phones/gadgets category with more than 4 products going at less than half price, and several other products going at much better prices than can ever be found online resulting in a crazy sale in that category,” he said.