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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
Ok, I have skimmed TFA. Near as I can tell half of the examples don't really have much to do with e-commerce. Planes canceled by weather? That really has little to do with the 'net. Short stock in stores? Again, that's just good or bad luck or planning, not something that really is related to e-commerce. And mistakes that go back to 1999 really aren't that relevant - that' s ancient history in terms of e-commerce.
Really, this article has only a tenuous link to e-commerce.
Three Squirrels
Elves: We are free and fairly sober with so many toys to build. The machines are kind of tricky, probably someone will be killed. But we gladly work for nothing
Fry: Which is good because we don't intend to pay
All: The elves are back to work today
Elves: Hooray! We have just a couple hours to make several billion gifts. And the labor isn't easy
Leela: When you all work triple shifts! You can make the job go quicker if you turn up the controls to super speed
All: It's back to work on X-mas eve...hooray
Leela: And though you're cold and sore and ugly your pride will mask the pain
Fry: Let my happy smile warm your hearts
Elf: There's a toy lodged in my brain!
Elves: We are getting awfully tired and we can't work any faster and we're very very sorry
Bender: Why you selfish little bastards! Do you want the kids to think that Santa's just a crummy empty handed jerk? Then shut your yaps and back to work!
Elves: Now it's very nearly X-mas and we've done the best we could
Fry: These toy soldiers are poorly painted
Leela: And they're made from inferior wood
Bender: I should give you all a beating but I really have to fly
Santabot: If I weren't stuck here frozen I'd harpoon you in the eye!
Elves: Now it's back into our tenements to drown ourselves in rye
Leela: You did the best you could, I guess, and some of these gorillas are ok
Elves: Hooray! We're adequate!
All: The elves are resting X-mas day, hooray!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
November 2006: Amazon.com
/.-style hit, but I didn't figure that a company as big as Amazon would have any problems handling that load in this day and age. I guess I was wrong.
Amazon's "customers choose" promotion/vote resulted in a limited number of XBOX 360 Core systems (then retailing for $300) being put on sale for $100 on Black Friday.
It brought Amazon to its knees. Loading individual pages, even those unrelated to the XBox, took over three minutes in some cases. I'm sure the XBox was meant as a simple loss-leader like most other Black Friday promotions, but the "sale" resulted in an extreme difficulty purchasing anything from Amazon for the two to three hours after the sale price went active. Ultimately, I'm sure a lucky few got the XBox, but I doubt they bought anything else. As for the rest of us, it was a pain to buy anything else even if we wanted to.
The saddest part was that this was 2006, not 1999. I knew it would be the equivalent of a
A few weeks later, some proposed that Amazon used it as a test-bed for their hosting/load leveling service that they unveiled a little later, so it's possible that the promotion was worth it to them if that was the case. Outside of that possibility, though, I can't believe CIO.com left this example out.
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.