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Ringing in another 'Cyber Monday'

If you're at all like I (and I am beginning to believe that most people are not), you avoid the stores and sales from Halloween through Valentine's and get all your holiday shopping done by Labor Day or spend weekends canning jam and sewing tiny catnip mice for the felines on your gifting list. . .

When there's hype around 'Black Friday' and news of people being murdered in pursuit of a cheaper DVD player, it's disheartening and dismaying. And when there's reports of Cyber Monday merchants experiencing web glitches and site outages, it's downright tragic.

A surprising number of online retailers, including Sears, Costco, Overstock, and even Victoria's Secret (!) experienced an array of performance and transaction issues over the holiday weekend and throughout Cyber Monday. While merchants who'd encountered problems in previous years were proud to be running 'flawlessly', others blamed 'sophistication' of websites and third-party vendors for problems. Finally, all the hated 3-D Flash content and bizarre marketing pixels added up to an array of dead sites! I feel in a small way vindicated for each client meeting where my suggestions of 'maybe you don't need Flash on every page' went unheeded...

Still, even the best prepared merchants encounter problems (my husband was busy Black-berry'ing over the weekend due to reporting errors on the site he runs) at times. In a way it's like the offline holidays themselves--no matter how much you plan, and how many pies you bake, something can and will go horribly, woefully wrong and fill your heart and holiday memories with dread and darkness. So bring on the wassail, homebodies and eCommerce workers alike -- The jingle bells toll for thee...

Labels: 2008, cyber monday, ecommerce, holiday shopping, IT outages, online sales, thanksgiving sales