Marc Benton dot Com

Yahoo’s Cyber Monday Gaffe

Cyber Monday unofficially marks the start of the online holiday season
where consumers hit the online markets, normally from the comfort of
their offices, to purchase what they were unable to obtain on Black
Friday.  The accuracy of Cyber Monday’s boast are under contention but
there is no doubt it marks a major day for online retailers with this
years numbers reaching a record $733 million.

During this year’s Cyber Monday, Yahoo Small Business experienced an approximately 12 hour outage.  To be fair their services were down for 7 hours with another 5 hours of degraded functionality.  Here’s a timeline of the issues from Yahoo’s status page:

• On Monday at 6:00AM PT, the systems that power our merchant stores
  experienced outages, and shoppers of those stores were met with either
  error messages or they were unable to complete the checkout process.
• These issues lasted until about 1:00PM PT when, despite slow
  performance, transactions began going through at a much higher rate.
• By 6:00 PM PT things were back to normal and the performance of our systems was at 100%.

Notice these are Pacific Times.  For east coast retailers the downtimes are 9:00AM to 9:00PM, effectively covering the whole day.  At least west coast users could recover some evening sales.

On the following Wednesday, Rich Riley (SVP, Online Channel Division) posted a mea culpa.

I waited to post this for a week to see if this was going to be the extent of Yahoo’s response.  It was.  Their idea of recompense for a complete day’s loss of revenue on one of the busiest shopping days of the year is to refund one month of sales transaction fees. 

Does this remind anyone else of the Capital One commercials with the old school corporate banker trying not to be bothered by the minuscule small business owner?  Should we not expect one of the internet’s leading provider of services to be more responsive and caring toward their own customers?  With over $13 billion spent online so far this holiday season, how confident should a small business be that Yahoo will allow their uninterrupted participation in the marketplace?

Yahoo should realize that this small gesture and words expressing their
priority of this service is not enough.  It goes beyond recompense,
they need to rebuild confidence in their current and future customers.  This can best be done with open and honest communications and then following through on their commitment.

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