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All Web Meltdowns Are Not Created Equal
Written by Evan Schuman
November 20, 2008
When file transfer site YouSendIt—with more than 100,000 paid users bringing in some $10 million this year—crashed on Monday (Nov. 17), it illustrated the kind of crash that should make retailers very concerned.
The crash itself, resolved by the end of the day, was caused by a hardware problem with Cisco routers in the company's San Jose datacenter, said Ranjith Kumaran, YouSendIt's chief technology officer. YouSendIt has two other data centers—one in Herndon, Va., and a European data center in London—but they weren't yet in a position to cover for the San Jose location.
But the bigger problem was twofold: When the file transfer systems died, that also brought down the Web site. And the system crashed in such a way that customers weren't sure if their files had been transmitted or not.
When customers called the company's headquarters, recorded messages instructed them to either ask for help through the Web site directly or to instant chat with support specialists, a service that is also only available via the Web site.
Customers didn't know what to do and all of the emergency help options were based on the (apparently false) assumption that the Web site would survive a system crash.
Always Assume The Worst
This assumption brings us to the retail quandary. It's inevitable that some retail sites will meltdown as the intensity of the holiday seasons gets ratcheted up starting next week. Indeed, there are reasons to believe it could be an especially site-crash-laden season this year.
That said, a site that crashes in the beginning of the transaction is in a much better position than one that melts down in the middle of checkout, leaving the consumer confused as to whether or not the purchase was consummated and the product shipped.
There's no mystery that the most meltdown likely part of an E-Commerce site is going to be at checkout. But beyond hardening that part of the process, the YouSendIt incident reminds all E-Commerce directors to assume that the worst will happen and to have Web-independent methods for consumers to get accurate purchase status. And, yes, that means publicizing actual phone numbers at a point prior to payment so that the if the purchase glitches in mid-payment, the customer has a way to get a status.
E-Commerce is a technology-based business, but putting too much reliance in that technology can make a bad situation much worse.
Consumers do not expect perfect E-Commerce transactions throughout the busiest shopping days of the year. If a site glitches, some will be open to being forgiving. But if you frustrate those customers further with a lack of information so they don't know if they need to purchase it somewhere else and risk paying double, that could give the term "meltdown" an even more frightening meaning. |
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Evan Schuman is the former retail technology editor for eWEEK.com, PCMagazine, CIOInsight and retail reporter for RISNews and Consumer Goods Technology. Having covered IT issues for 21 years - and other stuff like legal affairs, politics, Wall Street and the environment for about eight years before that - Schuman is in a good position to gripe about technology trends and sometimes accidentally make a good point.
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Sears.com Melts Down On Black Friday, But Costco, Walmart, Saks and Kmart Have Issues, Too
 Sears.com suffered the worst Web problems on Black Friday (Nov. 28), experiencing a series of complete site crashes for much of the day. Although no other major retailer came close, according to preliminary reports, many of the industry's largest merchants suffered site slowdowns or other Web problems, including Walmart, Kmart, Saks, Overstock, Amazon, Target, Kohl's, Costco and Buy.com.
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Questions dominate a Dec. 20 incident where some 8,000 Macy's customers had their debit cards charged as many as three times for the same transaction. One source said it involved a payment processor's slowdown.
A financial report on the troubles found last year with major department stores places the blame for the revenue drop not on the economy, but on chains that are "increasingly out of touch. The problem is that these stores have relied too heavily on the things shoppers care least about, like coupons, loyalty programs, delayed payments and contests."
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Tracking global retail from the United States, it's clear that Canada is the country most similar to the United States when it comes to retail procedures. Surprisingly, the next closest region is not the United Kingdom but Australia, and then arguably South Africa. So it's always interesting to see the few technology areas where American and Australian retailers diverge, and EPC is shaping up to be one of them.
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Amazon.com this week jumped in with a clever gift card strategy that bordered on brilliant, a tactic that could simultaneously boost revenue and steal sales from multiple competitors. So with such a wonderful plan, what would possess Amazon to put a statement that, at the most charitable, could be described as a phrasing so deceptive that even a New Jersey or Illinois politician would find it too over the top?
Amazon is far from alone this holiday season is pushing some new mobile efforts, standing alongside Walmart, Target, Gap and Sears in the popular holiday "let's fling random things at the cellular tower and see what sticks" game.
As the hoopla surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday mercifully subsided, some e-tailers were still struggling to keep their sites up, with Office Depot and Sephora suffering repeated outages while Walmart and Office Max—among others—experienced more sporadic mishaps.
The early holiday shopping season found fewer consumers hitting U.K. retail Web sites compared with last year's identical period, with some major sites seeing double-digit declines, according to Comscore.
Payments for taxis, parking and movies may prove less patient in waiting for new technologies than E-Commerce, a move that could be a bad sign for once-promising mobile payment method Near Field Communication (NFC).
Dollar General, the $10 billion discount retail chain, on Wednesday (Dec. 10) agreed to install specially-designed POS units intended to safeguard the privacy of visually-impaired consumers in all of its 8,300 stores in the U.S. "in less than eighteen months." The intent is to give those shoppers an alternative to touchscreen interfaces by offering tactile keys.
The economy sucks so GuestView Columnist David Taylor suggests that this would be an ideal time to shift budget away from regulatory compliance and spend it on something that will actually make money for your company, like direct mail advertising. No, he doesn't actually believe that, but he has the feeling that some executives are on the defensive when it comes to maintaining a focus on their areas during these dark times.
E-Commerce avatars—computer-generated 3-D replicas of consumers with precise measurements to help purchase clothes that fit better—may soon use digital video to incorporate a consumer's posture, facial expressions and smile.
Best Buy Chief Technologist Bob Anderson has been talking lately about the value of lending an ear to young innovators in the company. "You don't need a big, honking server and lots of funding or 50 people to start something innovative."
One columnist writes about the stampede death of a Wal-Mart assoiciate in New York when he was opening the doors for Black Friday shoppers. "No doubt," he wrote, "they were the same shoppers who complained bitterly about the ‘appalling lack of help' in the store." Indeed.
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Walmart.com is saying that they want to clarify that position, but then E-mailed a statement that, well, doesn't clarify much of anything. But it does do a nice job of hinting at something without actually saying it.
Whether the wing flapping of a bug can eventually cause a tornado is debatable, but Cyber Monday 2008 should serve as a warning to E-tailers to avoid the lesson learned by Staples and Dell on Monday (Dec. 1): Don't ignore the butterfly effect.
At about 6 AM New York time on Black Friday (Nov. 28), Wal-Mart's site went down for about an hour and then came back up. But this time, the company had moved its content pages to an outside service. Wal-Mart said this was a scheduled change, a concept that Gareth Evans, head of client services at Web tracking firm Sitemorse, finds unlikely.
Microsoft's Live Search cashback program—which gives rebates to those who comparison shop online and choose stores that are part of the program—was a bit too popular on Black Friday (Nov. 28) and crashed for several hours, leaving consumers with no cashback and a lot of anger.
In a trial initially limited to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel and Italy, Visa Europe is starting a trial this month of a card with an 8-digit alphanumeric display, 12-button keyboard and a long-life battery. The card has the ability to offer reciprocal authentication, which is designed to allow consumers "making transactions via phone or the Web a way to identify the party on the other end before transmitting identifying credentials."
Black Friday (Nov. 28) E-Commerce sales hit $534 million, reflecting a one percent increase from last year's Black Friday, ComScore reported Sunday (Nov. 30).
A group of credit card thieves in Seattle tried to maximize their profits by using their stolen credit card data to open a loyalty card account with Best Buy, where they could get could extra benefits along with their stolen products, according to a federal indictment filed Nov. 19. One had tried a similar rewards scam with a Home Depot reward card and a Sears gift card.
Recently released numbers raise questions as to whether online will be much of a savior at all. New figures from eMarketer project that E-Commerce sales will top last year's numbers by some $5.6 billion, a 4.1 percent increase from $136.8 billion to $142.4 billion.
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We make calls on PCs and surf the Web on our phones. The lines of separation are blurring fast. But in the world of retail technology, the difference between a kiosk and digital signage is one of the more difficult distinctions to make. How to describe that difference? To one CFO, the answer was obvious: A poem. In rhyming verse. Rhyming verse that is so bad it's almost good.
The further employees get from corporate, and from corporate networks, the more likely they are to do things with their computer that security managers would rather they didn't. GuestView Columnist David Taylor asks if these people might be doing things (e.g., downloading malware) that could bring down your company?
Podcast panelists debate card replacement problems, including inadvertently printing encryption keys on customer receipts and the refusal of the card brands to shorten how long expiration dates are valid. "We now have to worry about data that's been there as many as 12 years."
A loyalty card that consumers can turn on and off could potentially usher in a consumer revolution of sorts, allowing the majority to punish merchants they see as misusing CRM data that has been entrusted to them. At least that's one scenario painted by the president of the company that is pushing the card.
Amidst an avalanche of hype about the desirability of gift cards this holiday season, the National Retail Federation on Tuesday (Nov. 18) predicted a six perfect drop in gift card sales this season, from $26.3 billion spent during last year's holiday season to a projected $24.9 billion for this season.
Some 30 meters below solid bedrock underneath Stockholm, an abandoned nuclear bunker has been transformed into what could only be described as the world's coolest datacenter.
Several factors are lining up—including rushed technology upgrades, more site handoffs for everything from mobile to social networking widgets and a surge in traffic from bargain hunters—that could easily make this holiday shopping season one of the crashiest in years, if not the crashiest. (Note to copydesk: I don't care if crashiest is not a word. It should be.)
When Sears rolled out its mobile effort (Sears2go) this month, it illustrated the challenges for a retailer trying to craft a clean and stable mobile strategy at a time of extreme flux for the mobile space.
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