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Much has been written about Amazon’s growing dominance over the e-commerce landscape, from its shipping infrastructure to its pricing algorithms to its cloud infrastructure. Yet, it is the latter, its expertise in running the massive cloud data centers that are the lifeblood of the modern web and building the scalable and fault-resilient applications that sit on top of them that could very well prove a critical differentiator in the battle to come for the future of online retailing.
Amazon, like Google and Microsoft, built their massive data centers and software infrastructures not as commercial products to rent to others, but as the enabling environments they needed to build their own companies. For Amazon to process the hundreds of orders per second it receives during Prime Day or for Google to process the three billion searches it handles daily, the companies needed to build incredibly unique hardware and software systems that could handle their unique loads. Over time the companies began to rent their excess capacity out to others. But, at the end of the day, their systems were built from the ground up and battle hardened to withstand the kind of user onslaught that only a handful of companies on the planet have experienced.
For Amazon, this means that as other companies attempt to compete by launching or expanding their own online shopping experiences, most are at a stark disadvantage in terms of their experience and expertise in building and running the kinds of 24/7 production cloud environments for which even a few minutes of downtime can be the kind of catastrophic event that garners global headlines.
As an example of why this kind of cloud expertise matters, one has to look no further than my own recent experience with Walmart’s online photo shopping website, Walmart Photo.
This past Sunday I attempted to order a photo print from Walmart’s site and was able to rapidly customize my order and proceed through the ordering process without a hitch. Yet, when I clicked the final button to submit my order, after a few seconds I received a generic message that there had been an internal error on Walmart’s site and that I could either return to Walmart’s site and continue shopping or return to the very beginning of the ordering process and go through the entire process again.
Assuming it was either a glitch on my end or an intermittent issue, I went back through the process, with the same result. I tried clearing all browser cookies, tried multiple different browsers on different computers, all with the same result. Making matters more troubling, Walmart’s error page didn’t offer any information about what might be wrong, nor did it link to their online chat or customer service phone numbers or even provide a reference number or any other information that could be used to refer to the particular failed order when corresponding with customer service.
After a quick search, I turned up the company’s online customer service chat, but its sole advice was that the issue was likely on my end and to try resetting my browser yet again and then call the phone-based customer service when it opened the next day. Assuming that perhaps it was a one-day problem, I tried again two days later, to no avail. Calling their phone based customer service this time, I was told the company was currently in the process of upgrading its online ordering system and that its photo, grocery and pharmacy sites were all unable to accept orders for the time being, but that customers should receive an email when the sites were restored. When asked why the company hadn’t posted a notice on its site that ordering was disabled or simply turned off the ordering links for the time being, the representative didn’t have an answer. Similarly, when asked if ordering would be restored in the next few days, the representative could not offer any estimate. When asked if customers could simply complete their orders via the phone, the representative responded that customers could not place any photo, grocery or pharmacy orders until the upgrade process was complete and that no estimates were available on how many days that might take.
A company spokesperson subsequently clarified that I was one of a small percent of users who were “unfortunately experiencing a technical error within the Photo experience that temporarily prevents you from checking out. The team is aware of the issue and working to fix it.” The company did not respond to a request for comment on what percent of users were affected, saying only that “the vast majority of customers are able to checkout successfully.” The spokesperson clarified that the issue only affected their photo site, not groceries or pharmacy orders, but did not offer comment on why their online help, phone help and media relations offices all offered conflicting information on what was affected.
Most importantly, the company did not respond to a request for comment on why it had been unable to fix the issue for at least three days, leaving impacted customers with no information as to why their orders kept failing. Moreover, despite being fully aware of the issue, the company did not proactively track the failing orders and email those customers with more information to let them know what was happening and offer them an eta on when they might be able to eventually place their order. Instead, customers were left to assume the problem was on their end. Yet, perhaps most surprising of all for a company that has publicly touted its ability to go head-to-head with Amazon in the online retail wars, the company did not respond to two requests for comment on any estimates it could offer as to when the issue might be fixed such that affected customers could place their orders and its customer service department could offer no estimates either.
In short, a company that has spent billions of dollars to try and dethrone Amazon suddenly is faced with a technical issue on its site that is preventing some number of its users from placing their orders. Over the course of at least three days the company is aware of the issue and watches those failed orders go by, but is unable to either correct the issue or at the very least notify the affected customers to let them know what’s happening, either through a more informative error message or through an automated apology email. Not only that, but the company can’t even estimate when those customers might be able to place their orders again.
In the fiercely competitive world of modern e-commerce, an outage that prevents even a small fraction of your customers from placing their orders is typically an all-hands-on-deck emergency that involves every engineering resource available and where resolution times that span multiple hours are typically considered unacceptable. For such an outage to span multiple days with no estimated resolution in sight, no way for those customers to complete their orders even over the phone and no notifications to let those customers know what’s happening is simply unheard of. Operating in our modern cloud-based world requires thinking in cloud terms and cloud scales where customers expect to be able to purchase an item at any time of the day or night and for any technical issues to be fixed in minutes.
At the end of the day, it will take both incredible investment and a lot of luck for Walmart to dethrone Amazon as the e-commerce champion, but ultimately if the company can’t master the cloud, including fixing in hours, not days, technical errors that prevent even a small fraction of its customers from placing orders, it won’t stand a chance against a company that actually makes a living from pioneering the future of the cloud.
">Shutterstock
Much has been written about Amazon’s growing dominance over the e-commerce landscape, from its shipping infrastructure to its pricing algorithms to its cloud infrastructure. Yet, it is the latter, its expertise in running the massive cloud data centers that are the lifeblood of the modern web and building the scalable and fault-resilient applications that sit on top of them that could very well prove a critical differentiator in the battle to come for the future of online retailing.
Amazon, like Google and Microsoft, built their massive data centers and software infrastructures not as commercial products to rent to others, but as the enabling environments they needed to build their own companies. For Amazon to process the hundreds of orders per second it receives during Prime Day or for Google to process the three billion searches it handles daily, the companies needed to build incredibly unique hardware and software systems that could handle their unique loads. Over time the companies began to rent their excess capacity out to others. But, at the end of the day, their systems were built from the ground up and battle hardened to withstand the kind of user onslaught that only a handful of companies on the planet have experienced.
For Amazon, this means that as other companies attempt to compete by launching or expanding their own online shopping experiences, most are at a stark disadvantage in terms of their experience and expertise in building and running the kinds of 24/7 production cloud environments for which even a few minutes of downtime can be the kind of catastrophic event that garners global headlines.
As an example of why this kind of cloud expertise matters, one has to look no further than my own recent experience with Walmart’s online photo shopping website, Walmart Photo.
This past Sunday I attempted to order a photo print from Walmart’s site and was able to rapidly customize my order and proceed through the ordering process without a hitch. Yet, when I clicked the final button to submit my order, after a few seconds I received a generic message that there had been an internal error on Walmart’s site and that I could either return to Walmart’s site and continue shopping or return to the very beginning of the ordering process and go through the entire process again.
Assuming it was either a glitch on my end or an intermittent issue, I went back through the process, with the same result. I tried clearing all browser cookies, tried multiple different browsers on different computers, all with the same result. Making matters more troubling, Walmart’s error page didn’t offer any information about what might be wrong, nor did it link to their online chat or customer service phone numbers or even provide a reference number or any other information that could be used to refer to the particular failed order when corresponding with customer service.
After a quick search, I turned up the company’s online customer service chat, but its sole advice was that the issue was likely on my end and to try resetting my browser yet again and then call the phone-based customer service when it opened the next day. Assuming that perhaps it was a one-day problem, I tried again two days later, to no avail. Calling their phone based customer service this time, I was told the company was currently in the process of upgrading its online ordering system and that its photo, grocery and pharmacy sites were all unable to accept orders for the time being, but that customers should receive an email when the sites were restored. When asked why the company hadn’t posted a notice on its site that ordering was disabled or simply turned off the ordering links for the time being, the representative didn’t have an answer. Similarly, when asked if ordering would be restored in the next few days, the representative could not offer any estimate. When asked if customers could simply complete their orders via the phone, the representative responded that customers could not place any photo, grocery or pharmacy orders until the upgrade process was complete and that no estimates were available on how many days that might take.
A company spokesperson subsequently clarified that I was one of a small percent of users who were “unfortunately experiencing a technical error within the Photo experience that temporarily prevents you from checking out. The team is aware of the issue and working to fix it.” The company did not respond to a request for comment on what percent of users were affected, saying only that “the vast majority of customers are able to checkout successfully.” The spokesperson clarified that the issue only affected their photo site, not groceries or pharmacy orders, but did not offer comment on why their online help, phone help and media relations offices all offered conflicting information on what was affected.
Most importantly, the company did not respond to a request for comment on why it had been unable to fix the issue for at least three days, leaving impacted customers with no information as to why their orders kept failing. Moreover, despite being fully aware of the issue, the company did not proactively track the failing orders and email those customers with more information to let them know what was happening and offer them an eta on when they might be able to eventually place their order. Instead, customers were left to assume the problem was on their end. Yet, perhaps most surprising of all for a company that has publicly touted its ability to go head-to-head with Amazon in the online retail wars, the company did not respond to two requests for comment on any estimates it could offer as to when the issue might be fixed such that affected customers could place their orders and its customer service department could offer no estimates either.
In short, a company that has spent billions of dollars to try and dethrone Amazon suddenly is faced with a technical issue on its site that is preventing some number of its users from placing their orders. Over the course of at least three days the company is aware of the issue and watches those failed orders go by, but is unable to either correct the issue or at the very least notify the affected customers to let them know what’s happening, either through a more informative error message or through an automated apology email. Not only that, but the company can’t even estimate when those customers might be able to place their orders again.
In the fiercely competitive world of modern e-commerce, an outage that prevents even a small fraction of your customers from placing their orders is typically an all-hands-on-deck emergency that involves every engineering resource available and where resolution times that span multiple hours are typically considered unacceptable. For such an outage to span multiple days with no estimated resolution in sight, no way for those customers to complete their orders even over the phone and no notifications to let those customers know what’s happening is simply unheard of. Operating in our modern cloud-based world requires thinking in cloud terms and cloud scales where customers expect to be able to purchase an item at any time of the day or night and for any technical issues to be fixed in minutes.
At the end of the day, it will take both incredible investment and a lot of luck for Walmart to dethrone Amazon as the e-commerce champion, but ultimately if the company can’t master the cloud, including fixing in hours, not days, technical errors that prevent even a small fraction of its customers from placing orders, it won’t stand a chance against a company that actually makes a living from pioneering the future of the cloud.
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