Amazon.com Failure Demonstrates Poor Design

From: James Carlini <carlini_at_casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
Date: Sat 20 Nov 1999 06:39:44 -0600 (CST)

Yesterday, amazon.com was down for awhile with the
message saying that they would be back shortly. Does
anyone think about downtime as well as reliability and
redundancy when hyping all of this e-commerce approach?

This was a subject of discussion by several who were
amazed that they did not have any back-up. As one
person said - Your competition is only a "click away".

Selling products/ services on the web should be viewed
as mission critical. It would be good to see if any
statistics were available as to what the "downtime"
cost amazon.com. This should be a good lesson to those
that think they know about marketing on the 'net. YOU
better have some network reliability plan inplace,
Evidently, amazon.com did not. With the Christmas rush
coming soon, web sites designed poorly will suffer the
consequences if they go down.

Think about it in a conventional way - If a store in a
chain goes down (fire, electrical outage), the rest are
still open. On the 'net, if you're site goes down -
the whole "virtual chain" goes down.

Does anyone else focus on the reliability factor, or is
it not a priority in marketing plans? From the looks
of it, it will now become one.

James Carlini




Received on Sat Nov 20 1999 - 06:39:44 CST