By Adam Forrest, Demandware Product Marketing

It's easy to forget that the simplest way for customers to shop your site is for your site to merely be open. That is the beauty of online right, 24/7? Yet over and over again retailers sites go down, sacrificing revenue.

Although my previous post (10 Ways You Know It's Cyber Monday) was aimed at poking fun at the media created "super online holiday," there was a lot of truth to it. And even with a year's worth of preparation for "Cyber Monday," sites still crashed and crashed hard. Cyber Monday's site response times and crashes only underline the major risks of running the entire infrastructure internally.

StorefrontBacktalk.com did an excellent keeping a running dialog on Twitter letting people know which sites were down or experiencing longer than usual load times. They were getting their information from a variety of trusted sources such as Gomez, Keynote and Pingdom. Follow which sites have gone down by visiting http://twitter.com/SFBackTalk.

We all knew that sites would go down on Cyber Monday, it is inevitable with the amount of legacy homegrown systems out there, but the real disappointment of the day came from the error messaging. Take for example the screenshots below, saying they were down for either scheduled maintenance or were in the process of upgrading. Really? You scheduled maintenance on one of the busiest days of the year? Not very likely.

(Click on thumbnail to view larger image.)

It's all the rage today to be an "open" brand. If this is really true, it would be great to be honest with the customers and apologize for the downtime due to overwhelming traffic, tell customers you will extend the promotion and earn back the customer's trust. While J. Crew did not go that far, at least they admitted to a having a problem (Step 1), acknowledged that "even the best sites aren't perfect," and encouraged visitors to check back later or call the number below.

But in order to take the bitter lemons of a site outage and make lemonade, why not take this as an opportunity to merchandise? You know Cyber Monday is going to be a high traffic day for you and you know that most likely there are certain products or promotions that are driving these visitors to your site, so why not highlight these from this page? Give visitors product numbers, prices and an alternative to purchasing online and perhaps you've saved a customer.

Don't sacrifice sales or your brand's reputation by trying to do this all on your own. Concentrate on what you do best and then leverage companies that operate site availability, scalability, and security for you. Hopefully the rest of the holiday season will go smoothly...best of luck!