Online store debacle on Cyber-Monday

Author: ArunThe holiday shopping season in the US brings in lots of traffic to online stores every year. This year has been no different either. Unfortunately, online stores who had their e-commerce solutions hosted through Yahoo Store found their shopping carts going down at the wrong time, on "Cyber-Monday". Needless to say, online sales were affected. The problem was identified to be with the checkout process in Yahoo's shopping and transaction algorithm. It looks like lots of merchants were affected by this melt-down, judging by discussions going on in webmaster forums. CNBC has good coverage of the problem here. You can also check the status of this problem from Yahoo small business site. This incident just goes to show that even giants such as Yahoo are not immune from online store availability problems. For online store owners, it is always a good idea to proactively monitor the uptime and performance of their online shopping carts with a web site monitoring service such as Site24x7. The web application monitor feature in Site24x7 can be used to record any sequence of urls in an online shopping cart such as logging into a shopping cart, adding items to a cart, checkout, etc. Site24x7 will then keep simulating these steps at periodic intervals of time, scanning for any signs of trouble. If any errors are detected, email/SMS/RSS notifications are immediately sent and you can take corrective actions before your customers are affected.