Costco's CEO said it 'left something on the table' after the Thanksgiving website crash that prevented angry customers from shopping the sales
- Costco's website crashed for several hours on Thanksgiving Day, which meant that customers were unable to shop its deals online and on its app.
- In a call with analysts on Thursday, Costco CEO Richard Galanti commented on the website outage, describing it as "unfortunate." He added that Costco "did leave something on the table" because of it.
- Galanti did not comment on estimates from experts that indicated that the outage could have cost Costco nearly $11 million in sales.
- A spokesperson for Costco was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.
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Costco's website crashed during one of the busiest shopping days of the year and it led to a flurry of complaints from customers on Twitter.
On Thursday afternoon, Costco's CEO Richard Galanti addressed its Thanksgiving day website issues in a call with analysts after reporting its most recent quarterly results.
Galanti did not comment on what the website crash could have cost it in sales but said that "we did leave something on the table," when questioned about the website outage by an analyst.
"It was unfortunate," Galanti said. "Despite all the efforts to have plenty of processing capacity, if you will, there was something that occurred."
Galanti added that despite this, ecommerce sales were still up by a percentage in the high teens in the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, compared to last year's figures.
"What it tells us, we could have done better than that," he said. "So we did leave something on the table there. And again, we were able to correct it. It took several hours that day, unfortunately. But rest assured, we are spending a lot of money on things like that."
According to data from the outage-tracking website Downdetector, which was shared with Business Insider by the retail aggregate LovetheSales.com, the website was down for at least 16.5 hours in total.
A spokesperson for LovetheSales.com said that while some people may have been able to make purchases during this time, it would have been very minimal because of the number of problems with the site.
LovetheSales.com calculated that Costco would pull in about $11,035 in e-commerce sales per minute. A spokesperson said that this number was pulled from Costco's end-of-year financials and adjusted to account for the busier period. This means that in this 16.5-hour time period, Costco could have missed out on as much as $10.9 million worth of sales.
A spokesperson for Costco was not immediately available to comment when contacted by Business Insider.