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Sears.com doesn't understand the concept of scalability

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From Valleywag: How is it that major retailers aren't prepared for black friday and cyber monday? Sears.com went down after having "high volume," but that's just sad, considering that this weekend was huge for sales.

Not only should they be prepared for a huge traffic spike, but they definitely should embrace internet sales more. Brian Solis suggested that internet retailers make huge sales that happen from midnight until 5AM on "Cyber Monday" - only problem being, major retailers are scared that it'll take away from their retail sales. While the excuse is to be expected and somewhat understandable, there are plenty of people like me (and Brian) who wouldn't bother waiting on line at such an early time Friday morning just to save some money. If we could buy from the comfort of our own homes, that would be amazing. Not to mention, I'm much more compelled to add things to my shopping cart if all I need to do is click.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.
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6 Comments

Nov 26, 2007
Mitch said...
What would you be buying at Sears in the first place?

Mitch

Nov 26, 2007
Alex said...
A brand new Hoover vacuum of course! LOL
Nov 27, 2007
Jason Rojas said...
The thing is, scalability is a problem, that in some cases cannot be predicted. As an "IT guy", I face these issues almost daily with engineers' new ideas or new software. Yes, the Monday after "Black Friday" is something people should plan for. There are numerous reasons (especially in a large corporate sites) that cannot be accounted for (i.e: switches goe wacky due to crazy broadcasts or an application goes defunct because it has reached an OS/server level limitation). In situations where I have been at a shopping oriented company and there was a sudden spike of traffic/whatever, there have been instances where an internal application could not flex in order to deal with the circumstances. Not one company can truly test all these possibilities. It is the people who respond and alleviate the pressure that should be focused on. What could they have done to help make this problem "go away"? I don't know about your companies but I have been in four of them that have magically saturated a Gigabit ethernet/Fibre drop with a certain Mbit cap and felt the consequences.
So with that being said, this year it will be Sears, next year it will be Zappos (examples, examples), the year after that? Who knows. I feel that, in this case, pointing out a few hours of limited availability is more of mocking a company rather then using them as an example to how other companies, especially "Web 2.0" (I hate that term) companies, should be considering the flexibility of their app/site/whatever and maybe put the stereotypical funding (the 20-40% of budget) into IT. Granted that is not always the ends all solution, I have seen times (even at my current employer www.geni.com has had a few moments where downtime was absolutely necessary because of an infrastructure specific (OS/application/network/storage/oops wrong power cord) incident.
I always remember one thing in my line of work, five nines can always be quoted and compensated, so never be afraid to ask. But everything in the internet is a learning experience and because of non-disclosure agreements, a lot of lessons cannot be taught to others easily, unless off the record and all hypothetical.
Nov 27, 2007
Richard said...
LoL! Dyson is where its at!

I'm surprised that even popular sites like Newegg.com got hit with server load issues as well as Frys.com/Outpost.com

A lot of sites even big one's like Amazon just aren't prepared sometimes, or just traffic is incredible.

Nov 27, 2007
Siqi Chen said...
Scalability is expensive and hard. I mean EBay was down for like three days. I'm pretty sympathetic with all the scaling woes I've been having lately.
Nov 28, 2008
Jeff said...
Sears.com is down again on Black Friday, 2008. Same old, same old.

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