Comments on: Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Some Facts, Stats & Mishaps

By: For Amazon, Netbooks Are a Smash Hit

For Amazon, Netbooks Are a Smash Hit — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:00:48 +0000

[...] Om Malik | Friday, December 26, 2008 | 11:00 AM PT | 0 comments Santa was apparently good to Amazon.com this year; the e-tailer says its 14th holiday (shopping) season was its best ever, though it doesn’t offer any data to back up that cheery claim. Its biggest sellers (based on number of units ordered) included the Samsung 52-inch LCD TV, iPod Touch, Acer Aspire One netbook and Nintendo Wii video game console — all in line with the trends we saw at the start of the holiday shopping season. [...]

By: Chris - Collegiate Living

Chris - Collegiate Living — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:26:09 +0000

Some interesting points were brought up today regarding the outage of web hosting servers that brought down most likely millions of dollars of transactions.

It made me start thinking about the web hosting company’s responsibility to the e-tailor and web store owners. We have not heard of these types of issues on a major scale in a while like we have on cyber Monday.

The question I pose to web hosting companies is how much responsibility should they bear? For example, if Victoria’s secret is in an outage, and they estimate that they have lost about $500,000 in sales due that the server, is there any type of reassurance from the host that they will some how better this in the future and try to right this situation?

In all honesty, it probably does not matter to Victoria’s secret or Best Buy or Amazon for an hour, however, what about Joe selling sandals online or someone trying to make a living on eBay that an hour to them could be the difference of paying their bills for that particular month…

Food for thought and I’d love to hear what others think about the web hosting agent’s responsibility to the e-tailor.

By: Warren

Warren — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:14:20 +0000

Om,
To your comment – “according to Coremetrics, which also points out that there was an 18-percent drop in average session length — a clear sign that retailers are struggling to keep customers on their sites.”

Is that a sign of site abandonment or customers finding what they are looking for faster? We(Baynote.com) don’t use session length as a significant metric to indicate ecommerce site performance. For media sites, I think this is more important, since the goal is to burn more ads. On Ecommerce sites our products show the right stuff immediately, which can cut down session length drastically, but increase conversion rates and revenues.

By: More Bad News From AMD - GigaOM

More Bad News From AMD - GigaOM — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:38:42 +0000

[...] and all markets. This is not a surprise: PCs didn’t even rank among the top ten purchases during the post-Thanksgiving Day shopping period in the US despite big discounts. I think the entire PC ecosystem is feeling the strains of economy. [...]

By: richreads» Blog Archive » How richrelevance performed over Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:06:30 +0000

[...] views and recommendation clicks between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday – with zero downtime. If this GigaOm estimation of Black Friday E-business sales volume is correct, then about 10% was touched by [...]

By: RichGreenberg

RichGreenberg — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:22:41 +0000

How realistic is such forthcoming data from MC? What about taking into account Visa, Amex, Discover, and cash payers? I believe there have been many reports this shopping season that most consumers are opting NOT to buy on credit and either use debit cards or cash… So I say the data will not be complete or will not be accurate…

By: Black Friday and Cyber Monday Stats Come In, How Did Ecommerce Do? « E-commerce Solution

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:16:10 +0000

[...] news claimed that Cyber Monday had a record number of traffic hits in the afternoon, but one blog, GigaOM, says it was less successful than last year. Here’s are some of the conclusions he’s drawn [...]

By: Adwait Ullal

Adwait Ullal — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:27:03 +0000

Live.com had major issues on Fri when it offered 40% at HPShopping. Believe TechCrunch had post about it on Friday and so do many of the price comparison sites.

By: Helen

Helen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:31:04 +0000

We saw a lot of great deals on shoes as well (Endless, Shoes.com). I was surprised and disappointed at how often popular merchant sites would go down. Jcrew, Old Navy and Banana Republic were all down during peak hours. Really unfortunate for our shoppers who wanted to take advantage of their Cyber Monday deals.

By: Dealyzer

Dealyzer — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:14:25 +0000

I would love to get myself a Wii.