The food retailer Sainsbury’s has experienced first hand the backlash of a failed website.

On Tuesday afternoon, a technical fault was spotted on the online ordering website. They immediately suspended the site pending getting the fault fixed.

You can read more here.

This site has been offline since then and is expected to be off until Friday. Nearly four days of lost orders … not a great week for Sainsbury’s.

It appears the crux of the problem is that they are unable to access customers’ orders. It will impact around 20,000 customers before it is fixed.

What’s the lesson?

If you rely on your website for a sizeable income then make sure you have back up methods in place to allow you to continue trading even when things go wrong.

It’s obvious, but often missed. Even on a very complex system (which this system clearly is), there should be simple methods of extracting the informaton.

D.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.