Walmart on Friday announced that its 2013 Black Friday campaign has been a smashing success, with the store delivering “the biggest shopping day of the season,” even though not all its online customers were happy after Walmart’s website experienced some snafus. The retail store revealed that over 1 million customers took advantage of the One-Hour Guarantee promotion offered on 21 products this year, while the company said it processed more than 10 million transactions on Thursday from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., and its website registered nearly 400 million page views on Thanksgiving Day. In total, more than 22 million customers did their Black Friday shopping at Walmart. Walmart’s top sellers include big screen TVs and laptops, with the retailer singling out certain hot products such as the iPad mini, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and the Call of Duty: Ghosts game (see infographic below). Online, hand-held video games and SLR digital cameras were among the most popular items. Interestingly, Walmart said it sold over 1.4 million tablets during its Black Friday sale led by the iPad mini.
Deals will continue throughout the day, and Walmart will have more promotions for its customers on Cyber Monday. Its employees will also be compensated for their work on Black Friday through a combination of discounts and bonuses.
However all is not perfect in Walmart world: Customers identified various issues with the Walmart.com shopping experience, expressing their concerns on Twitter. Some buyers were not able to complete their purchases, despite trying for several hours to check out, AllThingsD reports. Walmart acknowledged the problem, saying that these were isolated issues.
“We’ve taken a lot of preparations and we’ve stress-tested and done all of those preparations, a spokesperson said. “There is also a point where the load that we’re seeing right now coming through is just really really high.”
In addition to shopping problems with regular items, buyers also encountered issues when trying to complete their One Hour Guarantee orders. The promotion allows in-store shoppers to buy online certain discounted items covered by the guarantee for the same Black Friday price, and have them delivered until Christmas, once the in-store stock has been depleted. Many buyers jokingly likened on Twitter the One Hour Guarantee website issues with the widespread Healthcare.gov issues. Walmart said that the buyers will be able to complete the purchases until Sunday evening, and the time will be extended in case the issues persist.
