Opinion: December 2007 Archives
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%.
On the following Wednesday, Rich Riley (SVP, Online Channel Division) posted a mea culpa.
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We have apologized to our merchant partners for the impact that this service interruption had on their business and their customers at this busy time of year. As a token of our commitment to them, we have communicated with them our intent to waive all sales transaction fees for the month of November.
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The success of our merchants’ business is extremely important to us, and we are committed to work as hard as we can, over and above the efforts already underway, to avoid such issues in the future.
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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