Colorado Web Solutions

Yahoo! Store Makes up for Outages

Posted on December 3rd, 2007 by Colorado Web Solutions - Yahoo Store Developers and Designers

This week the Yahoo! Store team did something that most big companies never do. They admitted their mistakes and offered compensation to their merchants. Huge Kudos go out to Yahoo! Merchant Solutions for making such a bold and admirable move.

If anyone was having doubts about the Yahoo! platform, I think this response from them should clear it up completely. This is how companies SHOULD do business!

Here’s the letter from Yahoo! Merchant Solutions:

Dear Valued Merchant:

On Monday, November 26, 2007, and for a very short time on Thursday, November 29, unusual service interruptions may have affected transactions in your Yahoo! Merchant Solutions/Yahoo! Store. We deeply regret any effect this may have had on your business.

Details:

On Monday, the service interruption and system slowdown lasted from approximately 6:00 a.m. until roughly 6:00 p.m. PT. During this time, transactions were either delayed or not completed.

After an investigation, we learned that the specific servers affected were the Shopping Cart database servers that handle cart contents for each shopper. New servers were added to the Shopping Cart database during our pre-holiday planning to manage the projected increase in transaction volume. During the holiday traffic surge, the hardware and software settings caused these servers to experience delays when customers added items to the Shopping Cart to complete checkout. When delays exceeded time limits, customers saw error messages stating that the servers had timed out (were not responding).

On Thursday, the service interruption occurred between 10:13 a.m. and 10:25 a.m. PT. During this time, merchants’ sites could not be accessed by shoppers.

After investigating the issue on Thursday, we found that this interruption occurred due to a network configuration issue resulting from new server capacity that was added for the holiday shopping season.

Immediately upon identification of both of these issues, our team worked hard to improve the situation as quickly as possible, and systems are now performing as expected.

These service interruptions were unrelated to our October feature release.

Addressing the Problems and Working to Prevent Future Interruptions:

We fixed the problems as quickly as possible, and we are continuing to make improvements to our system including the addition of new hardware and system maintenance conducted on November 28, 2007. For more information on current activities, please visit our system status page.

Our Commitment:

As a token of our commitment to you, we are waiving all sales transaction fees for November. There is no need for you to do anything. We will simply eliminate all transaction fees for the month of November once the normal billing cycle is run on December 6, 2007.

On behalf of our entire Yahoo! team, I apologize for the impact that this service interruption had on your business and your customers at this busy time of year. Please accept our commitment to work as hard as we can, over and above the efforts already underway, to avoid such issues in the future. The success of your business is extremely important to us, and we value your ongoing commitment to Yahoo!

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