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AUSTIN, Texas - Sunnyvale, California-based Internet company Yahoo suffered widespread service  outages within its Merchant Solutions online shopping checkout system used by about 45,000 small businesses, on what is for many Web merchants the busiest sales day of the year, yesterday's Cyber Monday, as it is known in some circles. Orders Lost Throughout Day Yahoo's system, formerly called Yahoo Stores, which allows businesses to process customer e-commerce transactions through the Web, was largely unavailable for most of Cyber Monday, beginning during the early morning hours and lasting until late at night, leaving some merchants upset and angry over lost Web orders. Yahoo posted messages on its support status Web page throughout the day, and by 5:30 a.m. (EST) acknowledged troubles it would later call "ongoing service interruptions" due to heavy holiday traffic. Many customers trying to place orders from any of the businesses using Yahoo's popular $40 a month Merchant Solutions service received a message to try back later, or in many cases a "service unavailable" error that did not identify Yahoo's Merchant Services as the source of the trouble. Cyber Monday occurs on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, and has been one of the peak sales days of the year for online merchants. Angry Customers, Upset Businesses Many of the businesses using Yahoo's Merchant Solutions found themselves unable to accept any online orders on one of the only days of the year which can account for sales more than twenty times greater than average, and also found their support phone lines inundated with frustrated customers unsure if their holiday shopping orders had successfully gone through. Some merchants scurried to place information about the Yahoo outage on their Web sites, and others took orders by hand. While Yahoo extended apologies to merchants using the program in an e-mail statement, many were upset at the course of action the company took and at the absence of detailed information about the outage and time estimates for correcting the service interruptions. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and we are continuing to put processes in place to prevent further disruptions," Yahoo said in an e-mail statement sent to its Merchant Solutions customers. Customers using Yahoo's "V3 checkout system," otherwise known as the "Checkout Manager", were affected according to the company. Untold Losses Lamented at WebmasterWorld Estimates regarding the amount of money lost by merchants in the Yahoo program are not available at present, however for many customers who depend on the service for their livelihood, seeing only a trickle or orders or no orders whatsoever on the day expected to provide the best sales of the year could be catastrophic enough to put them out of business. Some of those affected by yesterday's e-commerce failure at Yahoo have written about the anger and  frustration they feel at several popular Web site forums often used by owners of online businesses to communicate. At Austin, Texas-based WebmasterWorld, a community of mostly advanced level webmasters and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) professionals founded by CEO Brett Tabke, reactions to the Yahoo service outage ranged from disbelief to outrage. "How can Yahoo, with over 10,000 merchants, have their entire shopping cart system go down on the busiest day of the year," asked one WebmasterWorld subscriber known as "sbelnick". "They should have been prepared for this. This will cost them in the long run, as many merchants will inevitably leave," the user said. Both small business owners and merchants who receive considerable sums of money use the Yahoo program, and both types wrote about the outage. "This really hurts us small business people," said a user identified as "sherrycady", while another known as "minnapple" saw the service interruption as a very troublesome event. "I have a wide range of clients that push from $1,000 to $100,000 through Yahoo stores on a normal day," the user wrote. "This outage is huge considering this time of year. One day of sales is worth seven to twenty times the rest of the years daily sales," the user said. Stories of Disappointment with Previously Reliable Service New York Web retailer Sara Schwimmer felt the impact of Yahoo's shopping card system outage. "I couldn’t have imagined a worse scenario," Schwimmer said in a recent New York Times article by Brad Stone. "It’s been horrifying and it’s a loss of thousands and thousands of dollars. I can only imagine how many people have given up out of frustration. First impressions are lasting impressions. There’s no telling how much business we lost," said Schwimmer, who plans to leave Yahoo altogether because of the incident. Many of Yahoo's small business customers chose the company's e-commerce service because of the relatively large number of businesses using it, and because of Yahoo's track record and goal of providing "the most reliable e-commerce hosting solution on the Web." WebmasterWorld subscriber Rob Snell, who has been using the Yahoo service for over ten years and in 2006 authored a book about starting an online store using the company's shopping system, is pleased with the service's overall reliability even after yesterday's outage. "I've been on the Yahoo! Store platform since April of 1997, and overall, as a retailer, have been very, very satisfied. I've tried others, but have yet to find anything better," said Snell, who estimates that over $4 billion will pass through Yahoo's shopping carts this year. Frustration over Lack of Timely Information Yahoo could do a better job on communicating with its Merchant Solutions customers according to Snell. "My biggest complaint about Yahoo! Small Business these days has been with the lack of proactive communication from Yahoo to merchants," Snell wrote at WebmasterWorld today. Snell and other Yahoo merchants have made use of Web communities such as WebmasterWorld and "Y Store Forums" to share information about Yahoo's online shopping service, and during yesterday's outage one discussion saw hundreds of messages posted by frustrated and angry merchants, according to Snell. Yahoo's service accounts for the majority of business at the popular baby clothing Web site operated by John DiFrenna, which yesterday stopped receiving online orders altogether around 6:00 a.m., according to DiFrenna who was quoted in a recent CNBC article by Jim Goldman. "It's very frustrating. It starts with your investment in marketing the month prior to the holiday shopping season as well as how you schedule your inventory position," said DiFrenna. Yahoo Outage Shuts Down Cyber Monday Checkouts Yahoo's online channel division senior vice president Rich Riley issued a statement about the outage today. "We deeply regret the inconvenience this caused to both our merchants and their shoppers. Our customers' expectations were not met, nor were our own. And we are moving mountains inside Yahoo to find out why and how this happened, and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn't happen again," said Riley, who also emphasized Yahoo's readiness for the remainder of the holiday shopping season. "As for the future, rest assured that we are taking the necessary steps to prepare for the peak holiday selling season. We have technical and customer relations staff mobilized and ready to support our partners," Riley said. Some users of Yahoo's Merchant Solutions now wonder what the company will do to try to make amends for the lost sales, including WebmasterWorld user "gzlatin". "What is Yahoo going to give us back in exchange for losing thousands of dollars in sales? A free month?" Others look at yesterday's outage as a reminder to implement backup plans which could prevent Web customers from being unable to place orders, such as WebmasterWorld member "trinorthlighting". "I feel sorry for all the yahoo dollars lost today. [...] Lesson learned, diversify, have a couple sites, have multiple hosts or host your own and also have a couple different merchant check out methods, that way you can always flip one off and the other one on in emergency situations," the user wrote. Today many of Yahoo's 45,000 or so Merchant Solutions customers are left trying to recover income lost from orders that did not go through yesterday. Related Links:
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11:36 pm on Nov. 27, 2007 (utc 0)