November 28, 2007 | Wednesday
Cyber Monday breaks records…and Yahoo e-commerce infrastructure
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Online Sales |Search Engines |Yahoo
The day after Thanksgiving, nicknamed Black Friday, has long been the busiest shopping day in America. This is when all the shops traditionally let loose with their holiday sales. So the first day back at work (and employers’ high-speed ‘net connections) after the four-day weekend has been designated as Cyber Monday, as it commences the climb in online holiday shopping. In accordance with this, most e-tailers break out their best deals on Cyber Monday, too.
This year, the day was a record breaker, with sales rising 21 per cent to reach $733 million (about £354 million). Yes, for just one day’s sales.
This year, 44% of Internet users shopped online Monday, with 60% of dollars spent online that day coming from work computers, while the balance came from home and university computers, according to comScore. The number of Cyber Monday buyers rose 38% from a year ago, although the average amount spent per buyer declined 12%. That decline may be attributed to the steeper discounts offered by a broader number of online retailers this year and the fact that new buyers tend to spend less online than returning buyers.
So it was quite unfortunate that the surge in traffic knocked out the technology that powers the 40,000 online stores hosted by Yahoo. Thousands of online merchants saw their stores crash while potential customers attempted to complete their orders, and were forced to implore them to try again later in the day. The outage lasted almost 11 hours, after which Yahoo PR released a characteristically canned response:
Yahoo’s relationship with our merchants is extremely important to us, and we value their loyalty. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and we are continuing to put processes in place to prevent further disruptions.
The New York Times presents an example of one merchant whose story will make any business owner or online marketer cringe:
That apology rang hollow with small business owners who depend on Yahoo for their livelihood. “I couldn’t have imagined a worse scenario,” said Sara Schwimmer of New York, who runs PopJudaica, a retailer of Jewish products. Ms. Schwimmer has been using Yahoo to run her site since March of 2004. This year, she thought that the convergence of Cyber Monday and an early start to Hanukkah could translate into big revenues.
But orders on her site started to slow at around 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time, as Yahoo Merchant Solutions system began experiencing problems...“It’s been horrifying and it’s a loss of thousands and thousands of dollars. I can only imagine how many people have given up out of frustration. First impressions are lasting impressions. There’s no telling how much business we lost.”
Schwimmer says she’ll ditch Yahoo after the holidays, and she is probably not the only one who will do so.
Any guesses how this will figure into Yahoo chief Jerry Yang’s 100 day plan?
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