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Which E-Commerce System Will Fail This Season?
Esther Schindler writes "Every year, there's some retailer whose e-commerce or supply chain fails. And it's a big deal, since the holiday shopping season can make or break their year. The IT challenge encompasses everything from server scalability to supply chain management to search engine optimization to database cajoling to business integration to... well, come to think of it, just about everything. To explore this, CIO.com has a big package of articles examining "Black Friday" and its implications, entitled E-Commerce and Supply Chain Systems Gird for Black Friday. Topics covered include online shopping and holiday IT failures. Despite all this—and at least ten years of industry experience in e-commerce sales—we all just know that someone will make yet another big mistake. I wonder who it'll be this year?"
Gartner has a nice looking curve they use for technology take-up, looks like kind of a dampened sine wave.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
that Walmart's website will go down again due to high traffic on Black Friday. It'll be interesting to see how other companies, like Target, will do on that day as well. Something also is making me want to think that Best Buy will not perform to the same levels (time- and price-adjusted) as they used to, probably due to the credit crunch and that the Average Joe should be less inclined to make a moderate-large luxury purchase (e.g. 60" TV being moderate) this year compared to last.
But in all likelyhood, I'm guessing that the people who are going to be shopping less this year are going to be the lowest-lower income families, since a larger portion of their income is going to be spent on interest rates because they got taken advantage of with the adjustable-rate mortages and Home Equity Lines of Credit. So I'm expecting that people in the lower-middle to middle income families will shop at places like Kohls and Target rather than Macy's/Marshal Fields/Dayton's, while upper-income stores like Tiffany's will have another phenominal season.
over 3 minutes? Sounds like an improvement!
Ok, they're not normally that bad, but amazon is like the windows vista of web sites. I just loaded a typical page (with my cache turned off) -- 285 http requests, 558K of data, 41.3 seconds to download it all.
You can boycott them for 1-click, I boycott them because they're a bitch to use.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It gets about as much traffic as slashdot per quantcast.com. It got killed this week, multiple times. And it uses Windows Server 2003. When it does the Bag of Crap for $1 it takes hours to come back.
Load balancing is totally f ed over there.
The much busier refurbdepot.com is sturdier.
Farther down the posts somebody got tagged as a troll for mocking Vista as a server, but it's so true.