Amazon.com Inc. experienced technical issues yesterday that prevented some U.S. customers’ from being able to place orders on Amazon.com and caused some Amazon Web Services merchants’ inventory management features to malfunction.
Amazon, No. 1 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, first acknowledged the issue relating to customers’ ability to place orders at 12:47 p.m. Pacific time on its Amazon Seller Community discussion forum. The note read, “We are currently experiencing an issue that is impacting customers’ ability to place orders on the Amazon.com web site. We are working to correct the issue and will continue to provide updates until service has been restored.”
Less than an hour later it posted a second note alerting merchants who sell on the site that it was aware of issues regarding the display of item details within a seller’s inventory management feature.
Amazon declared the issue resolved about eight hours after its first acknowledgment. The causes of the problems were not disclosed.
The site didn't crash but it did have performance issues that significantly slowed it down, says Peter Alguacil, an analyst with web monitoring firm Pingdom. "They ran into performance issues that slowed down the site quite significantly, but I also verified that the site was reachable, albeit very slow," he says. "Strictly speaking there were a handful of requests that were met with HTTP errors, but nothing significant."
The reason for that slowdown is unclear, he says. "It could be almost anything," he says. "They operate a huge site with a lot of elements involved, so there are a lot of things that can potentially break."
Given that 31% of sales on Amazon.com in the first quarter were from other merchants that sell on Amazon.com, disruptions like yesterday’s have a significant ripple effect that go beyond consumers’ ability to make a purchase, says Eric Best, chairman and CEO of Mercent Corp., which connects the majority of its nearly 150 online retailers with Amazon’s marketplace. “These site outages or interruptions of service today affect a very large universe of third-party sellers,” he says.
Best estimates that Mercent’s customers lost about 28% of their daily revenue due to the outage, based on his analysis of sales over the previous 30 days. Compared to the average sales from the previous 30-day window, those clients sales were 50% below normal from noon to 1 p.m. Pacific time and 85% lower than usual from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
However, Best notes that outages on Amazon are a rare occurrence. “Generally, Mercent and our customers view Amazon as a stable ecommerce environment,” he says.
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