TKG Web Analytics Blog

It should come as no surprise to you that there aren’t many guarantees in life. Unfortunately for those merchants using Yahoo!’s ecommerce platform, a less than subtle reminder came at the worst possible time. As e-tailer’s geared up for the commencement of the online holiday shopping rush with the arrival of Cyber Monday, masses of motivated online consumers were fleeing filled shopping carts and taking their cash with them. Technological failure induced an error message making it impossible for shoppers to complete the ordering process. Tons of potential online buyers were greeted with a ‘system unavailable’ message as they attempted to purchase goods from many online stores utilizing Yahoo!’s small business ecommerce solution.

Now to the question on everyone’s mind, what will Yahoo! do to rectify a blunder that cost thousand’s of companies an incalculable amount of money? Whatever they decide to do, it is certain that a simple apology isn’t going to make those affected forgive and forget just yet. Indeed, this isn’t the first time a large corporation has made a huge gaffe – but it’s what they do after the fact to remedy their error that people tend to remember. It’s imperative that Yahoo!’s actions in the next few days offer retribution to those who suffered from their seemingly negligent preparation for increased traffic to restore faith in their ecommerce platform.

There will undoubtedly be speculations concerning the amount of money this will have cost Internet retail outlets. Those owners who had an analytics package in place could ultimately gain some insight into how much business this cyber meltdown cost them; though the numbers will offer little solace. Though as even the most novice web marketer could tell you – an increased bounce rate on your order processing page, not to mention during the holidays, is never a good thing!

Happy Holidays

Well, Google did it by buying Urchin, which of course means Microsoft has to take a crack at providing free web analytics.

Aside from the sheer ego factors, MS must have realized the amount of free competitive intelligence Google is gaining by offering Google Analytics. I doubt anyone is surprised to see this happen, but based on their browser war issues, lack of success in the search engine space, I also doubt anyone has high expectations for this.

On the other hand, processing data and generating reports is something that Microsoft desktop and server applications have been doing for years. So, this is a bit more “up their alley” than many of the other things they’ve tried in the past.

We’ll do our job and check it out as soon as we get the invite and give you our opinions.