Comments on: Yahoo Stores 14 Hour Outage On Cyber Monday Affects Merchant Orders

By: Tim McGuiness

Tim McGuiness — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:29:03 +0000

You are right, eCopt, there is a ton of work in making a change. It’s painful.

But you know what, it’s an opportunity to look at the business with fresh eyes and without limits. It can be liberating.

It actually is possible to go years without unscheduled downtime for sites doing 7 figure/month sales.

By: eCopt

eCopt — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:34:17 +0000

@ Tim McGuiness – You bring up some very good points Tim. I agree that hosted solutions are not all bad, in fact, some of the best products out there are sold on hosted platforms and seem to run very smoothly.

The biggest reason why most stay with a provider after growing, in my opinion, is because of the hassles involved with transferring platforms. There’s so much planning and work involved in making the move that most “psych themselves out” before even attempting to research what it takes for them. Some are a pain, some are not, it really just depends on the business model and number of products. But, if you are fortune 500 or even some 100′s there really is no excuse not to make the switch upon reaching that status.

@ Bob – Sorry to hear about your troubles from Monday Bob. You are certainly not alone (about the 50th person I have talked to about this fiasco). Their transaction fees have been an issue (and reason for vendors leaving that platform) many times in the past with their merchants.

What cart are you switching to? There might be other Yahoo Store owners thinking about the same thing, they may be interested to know what works for others or what others are trying. If you can’t share that information, I understand.

The fact that they use a third-party url is really not a huge underlining issue, but, you’re right, it is better to use checkout urls that that include the vendors domain, on the https version (one big benefit to using your own domain with checkout is that it allows for easier tracking into the conversion process, meaning you can see more visitor stats deeper into the checkout process).

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:04:01 +0000

I am VERY sick of my Yahoo store! I donâ€™t know how they justify charging transaction fees when there are so many other carts out there. I am switching in January.

The problem is they use the same checkout URL for EVERY STORE. Thatâ€™s like having one checkout lane for an entire shopping mall. My store was down for 11 hours on Monday. Thatâ€™s inexcusable.

By: Tim McGuiness

Tim McGuiness — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:28:59 +0000

I love hosted solutions like yahoo or monster or volusion. I think they are really good - I recommend them all the time. But I can't understand why someone who is past start-up would stay there and yet I see people in the 500 staying there. With 7 figure monthly sales volumes, it just is not acceptable to have any hiccups.

You need to know if your payment gateway is down or if UPS's portal is down and implement an automatic contingency plan. Don't slow down shopping.
You need to know immediately if pages are loading slowly.
You need to know if sales are trending below what they should be and get alerted to figure out why.
You need to put your customers first.
You should never have to call to ask if the system is down, you need to be called by someone who knows your business and is fixing the problem.

It's not about blame - it's about getting it right and making sure you learn. Doesn't this a lot more? Yup. But its money you ought to be paying.