Target Corp. left little to chance over the big Black Friday shopping weekend, shaving many of its prices to the bone to better compete with Wal-Mart and Amazon and thereby emerging as a low-price leader.

Its toy prices, for example were 1.3% below Wal-Mart on Black Friday, 5.2% below Amazon.com, and also beat Toys R Us and Kmart, according to research from Bloomberg Intelligence. The retailer also offered a 15% site-wide discount on Cyber Monday, plus sale prices on a host of other items, some in limited quantities.

As a result of that assertively promotional pricing, Target had quite a weekend, setting an e-commerce traffic record on Black Friday and doubling that Cyber Monday. 

But this success on Cyber Monday also brought trouble. Target's website was slow or not working at all for many shoppers, a situation a spokesperson insisted was not a “crash” but rather a tactical “metering” of traffic that kept people in line as they waited to shop or check out.

“As we experience spikes in traffic, our systems place guests in a queue and prompt them to access the site later,” a Target spokesperson said in a statement. “We apologize to guests who experience any delays, we appreciate their patience, and encourage them to try again in a few minutes by refreshing their browser.”

Although this "metering" approach caused some outcry on social media, some tech experts say that Target's unique handling of online traffic actually did some good, providing informative customer service while dealing with a massive digital infrastructure. 

“It made it a little cumbersome, but it wasn’t the worst. It was certainly creative,” Rob Coon, director of e-commerce logistics provider Dotcom Distribution, told Retail Dive.

Coon said he wondered how effective Target's approach was in the end. While a Target spokesperson said the retailer doesn't have such numbers, he pointed to a blog post that reads in part, "we had to place some guests into virtual lines on Monday to manage all of the traffic and order volume. We know many guests had delayed access to the site and we apologize for the inconvenience. It was our way of ensuring the site stayed stable so holiday shoppers could take advantage of the great offers and free shipping."

A distinction without a difference?

The distinction wasn’t much appreciated by many customers, who took to social media to vent with a #targetfail hashtag about the difficulties of shopping there. At least a few on Twitter made a point of saying they would look for the items they were attempting to buy on Amazon, which notably had no metering or crashing (or whatever you want to call it) despite heavy promotions.

Still, some tech experts were somewhat impressed with Target’s handling of the heavy traffic, saying that, while it wasn’t ideal, it was an effective way to keep customers informed that they were still in line.

Coon himself used Target’s site on Cyber Monday. Because of his work, which includes helping retail clients plan peak e-commerce capacity needs, he understood the problem Target was dealing with. As a customer, he was also somewhat impressed. 

“It wasn’t a standard message. For those 15 seconds my items were in a cart, and I’m sure they were reserved for me from an inventory standpoint,” he said. “It proved to me that they had planned for it. I thought that was unique.”

Certainly, Target’s on-again, off-again Cyber Monday wasn’t the kind of crash that, say, Neiman Marcus experienced on Black Friday, which took its website out of commission for extended periods Friday and Saturday, two days of the shopping weekend that saw healthy online sales. On Friday, the Neiman Marcus site was down for a whopping twelve hours, and on Saturday, after first appearing to being resolved, it crashed again by mid-afternoon. Other retail sites, including Newegg, Jet, Foot Locker, and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., and payment site PayPal saw crashes or significant slowdowns over the weekend, though nothing close to Neiman Marcus’s hours-long blackout.

So Target took heat on social media for the hiccups, and the press didn’t quite know how to describe the phenomenon, with some outlets calling it “balky” and others lumping it in with the other retail outages. Still, while Target’s pleas for patience may have annoyed some customers, they did communicate that follow-through on shopping and check-out was possible and momentary, and most of the “crashes” were fleeting.

“What people don’t realize is this— if Target didn’t share that banner, consumers would have gotten a different error message,” Jack Sweeney, CEO of digital infrastructure management company SevOne, told Retail Dive in an email. “All Target did was good PR in that situation, communicating to consumers that while they’re sorry for the inconvenience, Target acknowledged it and was trying to fix the problem.”

The limits of legacy systems

Larger retailers like Target in some ways are hamstrung by their more cumbersome IT systems, which stitch together many aspects of their operations but aren’t necessarily ready for today’s speedy, mobile-driven consumer. As Mike Azevedo, CEO of database company Clustrix, told Retail Dive: “They’re not using state of the art technology.”

For one thing, employing the state of the art solutions, Azevedo says, would have enabled Target to expand its capacity as necessary for its more bloated needs over the shopping weekend, then shrink it back to more normal levels when the virtual door-busters ended.

But those kind of nimble solutions aren't always possible in a digital system that has been built over a decade or more, and that has to handle a lot of different, company-wide tasks.

“While we are not certain as to what happened to Target on Monday, what we know is this—These massive infrastructures such as Target’s create billions of data points daily, and companies are under enormous pressure to interpret this data to understand what’s happening in their digital infrastructure,” Sweeney said. “They need to make sure they have full visibility across that infrastructure to understand things such as volume of traffic, applications, and overall capacity in order to maintain service operations. Many companies are using legacy management solutions, which weren’t built for the mobile economy, resulting in outages, blind spots and service issues.”

Dotcom Distribution’s Coon agrees, saying that some emerging or mid-tier brands sometimes have an advantage because, starting more recently, they’re better set up to gain more from the cloud.

“You have to remember, these systems [like Target’s] aren’t one-dimensional,” Coon said. “They’re talking with their back channels and every one of their vendors. So it’s a domino effect, and it’s hard to pivot.”

The plan for next year starts now

So, Target’s metered Cyber Monday can be seen as a fairly well played stop-gap effort, but it’s not likely to pass muster with consumers next year. Indeed, Coon says that retailers’ IT departments have to begin planning their capacity needs for next year once the lessons from this season are in — in about early January. 

“It’s painful because you’ve just come out of peak season and then you have to start thinking about peak season,” Coon said. “With technology, there always is a solution. The question is — is there enough time considering what you’re dealing with?”

And Clustrix’s Azevedo says that mobile is part of what is making today’s shopper more impatient. While shoppers in front of their desktop computers are often static and comfortable, on their phones, by contrast, they’re on the go. As mobile grows in importance, that impatience with faltering or failed e-commerce sites will likely grow, too, according to Azevedo.

“You don’t have the shopper in their cozy couch, so they don’t have the patience,” Azevedo said. “So you lose them faster and a slow-down will annoy them even more. There’s more of an impact with a slow site on a phone.”