One of the largest online shopping days of the year, Cyber Monday brought in over an estimated $700 million in online sales yesterday, but not via Yahoo Stores (now known as Yahoo Merchant Solutions).
Seems the Yahoo Stores shopping cart software crashed yesterday, leading to a dramatic loss in revenue from over 10,000 online merchants which use Yahoo Stores to power their ecommerce systems.
Ira Steiner of AuctionBytes reports:
Yahoo Merchants Solutions (formerly called Yahoo Stores) suffered technical problems that prevented some shoppers from completing purchases on Monday. A message on the Yahoo Merchant Solutions System Status page said characterized the problem as an “Error Message During Checkout” at 8:31 AM (PST). At 5:12 PM (PST), Yahoo posted it was still investigating the issue, apologizing for “the ongoing service interruption for our V3 checkout users (Checkout Manager).”
Yahoo published another update at 6:51 PM (PST) Monday evening, reporting it had made configuration changes. “All merchants are able to accept orders at this time with slower than expected performance. We are continuing to investigate and make additional changes to optimize the checkout experience. Additional updates will be provided as they become available.”
Yahoo Merchant Solutions accounts were back up and running at 2 am EST this morning, shutting out the majority of Cyber Monday sales for merchants using Yahoo Stores.
CNBC’s Jim Goldman has more information on the outage and quotes from merchants:
“It’s unreal that there was not appropriate preparation done to head off this type of major issue. A logical person could assume a temporary glitch or two based on traffic and transactions, and that is fine, but now we are talking about 8+ hours of prime down time.”
“We are a growing company on the Inc5000 list of fastest growing companies and having a hosting provider who cannot keep our stores online during the peak shopping time of the year is unacceptable. Yahoo has never offered any explanation other than vague ‘technical glitches’ and in this business environment where customers are expecting peak performance, my business and reputation suffers as a result of a hosting company who can’t manage to keep servers going.”
With Google Checkout growing and Google offering online storage, this would be an ideal time for Google to step up and offer a competing service for disgruntled Yahoo Store merchants.
Horrible timing by Yahoo as the company is trying to defend its search market share while fortifying its successful solutions, which used to me Yahoo Small Business Solutions before yesterday.
Are you a Yahoo Stores merchant? What was your experience yesterday and your planned reaction?
