Yahoo Store debacle

[hoosierdraft]

Well, you can tell its cyber Monday. Traffic levels go up and Yahoo Store does a melt down. Checkout has been down for close to 3 hours and probably sporadically down for longer than that. You would have thought a giant would be better prepared.

[jwurunner]

Absolute disaster for us...We were having a record weekend and now this...What a disgrace for Yahoo to have issues on one of the most important days of the year. And they have NO ETA as to the fix...

Pathetic..

[Winooski]

Yeah, definitely bad timing. I don't believe it comes on the heels of any scheduled server edits, so it has more of the feel of an "unintended backhoe edit".

Yahoo! Store / Merchant Solutions merchants can keep abreast of the official word at [updates.smallbusiness.yahoo.com...] or can get a much more real-time lowdown from fellow merchants at YStore Forums' current crisis thread, [newforums.ystoretools.com...] (Note: You need to register for access, but it's free).

[your_store]

Definitely a horrible day for Y!Store owners..

"unintended backhoe edit"

That's a very nice way to put it ;)

[sbelnick]

My store shopping cart has been down for almost 3 hours now. How can Yahoo with over 10,000 merchants have thier entire shopping cart system go down on the busiest day of the year? They should have been prepared for this--evidently they were trying to skimp/save on costs and were underprepared for this. This will cost them in the logn run as many merchants will inevitably leave.

[nichenet]

Same issue on our store - We were chugging along with orders then BLAM - nothing now for the last 4+ hrs

[robsnell]

Howdy! For the past three hours I've been on the horn with multiple Yahoo! Store developers and some folks in Sunnyvale and it looks like a full-scale meltdown.

Three hours later, we're getting a trickle of orders (10% normal), so I know the new checkout/shopping cart is back up and working for some folks, but it keeps timing out when I try it.

The second I found out the old cart server WAS working, I switched one of my smaller stores back to the old cart and sales jumped back to normal, but I'm hesitant to do this on the big stores because of the long publish time and my faith and confidence in the store folks to get this fixed sooner than not...

DISCLAIMER: I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND SWITCHING BACK TO THE OLD CART UNLESS YOU ARE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING! Newer stores don't have this option.

All my revshare projects are on the OLD CART (the 11 year-old version 1, not the v2) and they're rocking out today, but I am hearing reports of problems with the old cart servers as well.

Yahoo! Stores have traditionally been bullet-proof compared to any other service (email, paypal, ebay, amazon, etc) I've ever used and I know they'll get us back up and running in no time...

Rob

[sherrycady]

Man, this really hurts us small business people. I hope all will be up and running soon. I haven't received an [order] in over 4 hours! Now I'm regretting not having the 800 number for my customers to call.

[edited by: sherrycady at 8:04 pm (utc) on Nov. 26, 2007]

[hoosierdraft]

Now featured under "Breaking News" headline on CNBC.

[Winooski]

While we Yahoo! Store merchants are waiting, we can also try adding a message in the header of all our pages, something to the effect of, "Our servers are currently experiencing issues, so if you have any difficulty placing your order, please call us at..."

[gzlatin]

Yeah, this is really unacceptable. Overall, Yahoo's servers are pretty slow and this is just the nail in the coffin.

What is Yahoo going to give us back in exchange for losing thousands of dollars in sales? A free month?

We had better at least see a VERY large PPC credit with Yahoo to try and make up for this.

[hoosierdraft]

CNBC just ran a segment on TV. Estimated 3 million sites hosted by Yahoo. Some questionable reporting there.

[jwurunner]

Yahoo! Stores have traditionally been bullet-proof compared to any other service (email, paypal, ebay, amazon, etc) I've ever used and I know they'll get us back up and running in no time...

Um yeah, no time would be a 30 to 45 minute outage NOT a 4+ hr outage on one of the most important days of the year for ecommerce.

Yeah, this is really unacceptable. Overall, Yahoo's servers are pretty slow and this is just the nail in the coffin.

What is Yahoo going to give us back in exchange for losing thousands of dollars in sales? A free month?

We had better at least see a VERY large PPC credit with Yahoo to try and make up for this.

We will be lucky to get a partial credit for downtime for the month. There is no way they would give PPC credits nor multiple months free.

[porterhouse]

We've been on Yahoo since 2001 and seems like no selling season is complete without system problems from them. Been looking for an alternative, but there just don't seem to be many out there. Hopefully something will turn up soon.

Yahoo clearly doesn't care about their merchants and this is just the last nail in the coffin. Major system enhancements rolled out in Q4 (with major bugs I might add!) and now server outages with not real plan for getting it back up..... doesn't fit the profile of a good business partner.

[robsnell]

I think the 3 million is Y!SB Web hosting and domains customers, not the 45,000 Yahoo! Store accounts (last publicly available number I have)...

I can't believe it made CNBC, though. -- Rob

[Montpelerin]

This is really incredible.

The reason we pay a premium for Yahoo is to avoid situations like this.

I am extremely disappointed with their reaction (keeping us in the dark) as well.

Hopefully heads will roll for this catastrophe.

[Montpelerin]

This is the perfect time for Google to introduce a merchant platform - we could then accept Google Checkout as well.

...are you reading this Google (and Yahoo).

[BeermanSC]

Yahoo Can't Cope with Cyber Monday

[cnbc.com...]

[pbradish]

... which is why we always host our own e-commerce websites. At least that way if one goes down, it's our own fault.

Hopefully Yahoo! does something to reimburse you guys. I'm a little surprised that a company so large would let this happen, on Cyber Monday of all shopping days. Talk about being prepared (Yahoo, not you).

One of our major competitors is down with this issue, as I'm sure are some of the lesser competitors. It's bitter sweet because while our sales are way up, a ton of friends may not have such a happy Cyber Monday :(.

[Rugles]

Oh man, these sites just hang when you get to the cart.

Having an 800 number has never been so important.

[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.

[WiseWebDude]

Wow, I feel for you Yahoo users. That is like a kick in the nads to be sure. Oh, I can see some webmasters with beet red faces right now. I bet this will really hurt Yahoo. They seem like they are getting worse by the day...not a good sign there. Good luck all!

[hoosierdraft]

Eight hours later, still massive issues with checkout on most stores. The lack of information for merchants coming out of the Yahoo! bunker is deafening.

[minnapple]

I have a wide range of clients that push from 1k to 100k through yahoo stores on a normal day.

This outage is huge considering this time of year, one days of sales, is worth a 7 to 20 times of the rest of the years daily sales.

[Bewenched]

It's times like this that I can justify the $800 per month bill for a dedicated server with failover, fault tolerant SCSI drives, RAID controllers redundant power supplies .... yadda yadda... and the phone number of a dedicated tech in case it really hits the fan.

We haven't had an outage in 5 years.

[minnapple]

Give a ecom owner a stable/flexible application and stable server at a reasonable cost and they will be a loyal customer for life.

I almost went broke in that quest.
tear/agh

[incrediBILL]

I feel bad for the store owners, but as an old ecommerce software developer for 8 years I can't help but laugh at Yahoo's meltdown and complete incompetence to be able to resolve the situation.

Oooopsie...

[kanetrain]

Issue took over 16 hours to resolve (still not all the way resolved). The lack of communication on this one out to merchants was unbelievable. Just complete silence and spin about "some merchants have reported some problems" when in reality it was a complete platform wide outage.

Wow. It will be hard for them and their merchants to recover from this.

From Yahoo's Status Page:

"Update: 11:06 PM (PST)
At this time, all merchants are able to accept and process orders as expected. We are actively monitoring all systems involved and will provide further updates as necessary."

Right... now that it's 11:00 at night the can handle the trickle of traffic. Someone (or lots of someones) at Yahoo got caught sleeping at the wheel and the consequences were catastrophic for tens of thousands of merchants.

Not only is it unacceptable, but it's completely unbelievable too.

[Tribewolf]

I am astounded that this type of thing still happens. I can't believe that so many people still rely on and trust Yahoo with their livelihood after so many missteps over the years.

For those of you who have been affected by this I feel so sorry for you. I hope nobody gets put out of business due to the loss. I know alot of people depend on after Thanksgiving sales for their annual profit.

There are better alternatives available. You just don't know about them because they don't have million dollar ad budgets to be able to compete for space in the search engines.

[edited by: engine at 2:29 pm (utc) on Nov. 27, 2007]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[limoshawn]

Oooopsie...

Well put!

It's times like this that I can justify the $800 per month bill for a dedicated server with failover, fault tolerant SCSI drives, RAID controllers redundant power supplies .... yadda yadda... and the phone number of a dedicated tech in case it really hits the fan.

We've recently made the move to dedicated (not from Yahoo) and couldn’t be happier!