Black Monday Review

It's been more than a week since the lost blog post. I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving and please excuse the tardiness of this post. We at Mpayy are speeding forward to completion of our site and moving to User Acceptance Testing and our late January 2008 launch.

The Importance of Scalability

One of the beauties of the platform being launched at Mpayy is the application's scalability. Leveraging onto the bank's infrastructure, we are prepared to handle millions of consumers' online transactions simultaneously. Once consumers get a test, they'll be itching for it, and after yesterday's experience shopping on "Cyber Monday", merchants will likely be ready as well.

Our good friends at Internet Retailer reported two stories that caught our eye.

First, Comscore reported ecommerce transaction times that spiked due to volume. "While none of the sites suffered shutdowns, many experienced extended checkout times of up to two minutes." These sites, and the connections to their payment processors slowed signifcantly, and underlines the importance of multiple payment options and the investment in the Checkout processes.

Internet Retailer also reported that 40,000 Yahoo store merchants were unable to process payments yesterday. Here again, one would expect Yahoo to have capacity models out the wazoo so that such an important day of selling was not lost, but this does not seem to have happened.

Internet Retailer quoted Kevin Hickey,

"Kevin Hickey, vice president of marketing at New Stanton, PA-based OnlineStores.com, which operates several sites on the Yahoo Store platform including EnglishTeaStore.com and United-States-Flag.com, says his company lost about $35,000 in expected sales yesterday as it was able to take in only 20% of its usual volume on the phone and in sporadic online orders.

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo wasn’t up to its normal level of reliability yesterday,” Hickey says. “It might spur us into looking into alternate platforms and to have a redundant back-up system for taking orders.” "