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During my time as an engineer working on Amazon.com, we occasionally experienced outages of various lengths. One of the surprising details about these outages i

During my time as an engineer working on Amazon.com, we occasionally experienced outages of various lengths. One of the surprising details about these outages is that they really didn't result in any revenue loss. That is, it appeared that customers would simply wait until the website was available again to make their purchase. I would be surprised if that effect doesn't still happen today especially with the availability of Amazon on a variety of platforms (i.e. customers are comfortable ordering from their phones when they couldn't get to the website from their desktop computers).

dredmorbius 14y ago
That's a really interesting observation and substantiates a suspicion I've had: people generally have a good idea in mind of what they're going to buy and about when they're going to buy it. If at a particular moment the opportunity doesn't present itself, they'll simply delay the purchase until it's possible. This would apply more to purchases from a specific and exceptional point than those which can be made from multiple providers. Say, my usual lunch spot is closed or out of an item, and I can walk down the street elsewhere (or a drugstore, etc.). However if you're selling hard-to-find exclusive items, or we've got an established relationship and the item isn't something I need right now, I'll simply get it later. On the macro scale, it makes me suspect that shorter interruptions to service don't have a significant regional financial impact. Though this is all armchair economics.
- ZeroMinx 14y ago
  > people generally have a good idea in mind of what they're going to buy If I may, could I suggest another possibility; People know, and trust, Amazon. "I can't load the shopping site. Maybe it'll work if I reboot." It's quite different for a site that's not as well known as this one.
  - robryan 14y ago
    Definitely, we can make sales numbers riding on the back of their reputation in the marketplace on amazon that we can get nowhere near with website sales in the US market. From a customer standpoint their a-z guarantee probably helps a lot.
  - jzwinck 14y ago
    That's exactly right. I'd wager that millions of people have bought from Amazon but no other online store. And I doubt any other online store selling physical goods in the US can beat them by that metric. It's not that people won't shop elsewhere but that they literally are unprepared to let themselves do so. One-click shopping is a great idea to keep grandma loyal to the store, because her son probably set it up, and he's not home now.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Yeah, Amazon's got trust, an established relationship, excellent customer service/satisfaction, and a good payment management history, all of which are crucial in online commerce (and for all of that I still prefer not to use them, for what it's worth). Musing over my own post, I can think of instances where the same would not be true. A financial trading platform in particular -- trades are already occurring at volume, and lost time would be lost trades.
sneak 14y ago
This is really insightful and sort of flies in the face of the research about Google's page latencies affecting search volume (even subconsciously). Thanks for sharing a non-obvious data point.
- rgovind 14y ago
  I would disagree. Search is different from Buying goods. In search, most of the times you are looking for instant answers. Buying goods, you can put off by half an hour and it won't affect you.
- magicalist 14y ago
  It was actually someone from Amazon themselves, reporting on a/b testing they did, that gave us the numbers of 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. People might wait for Amazon to come back, but if it's slow to navigate back and forth to compare brands, or slow to return search results, or slow to just render the page, you can easily imagine losing some percentage of people or just some percentage of what you could have sold to them. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900
photorized 14y ago
I find this more believable than various claims about how a 10-millisecond page delay results in multimillion loss of revenue.
- robfig 14y ago
  That's coming from Google, who makes money off page views. Amazon has a different model, so I could believe the latency sensitivity of its business is different.
  - lukeschlather 14y ago
    There is an important distinction here between latency and availability. It's possible Amazon could be very sensitive to small changes in latency, while availability isn't that big a deal. After all, a lot of retailers do fine with nightly outages lasting 12 hours or more.

dredmorbius 14y ago

That's a really interesting observation and substantiates a suspicion I've had: people generally have a good idea in mind of what they're going to buy and about when they're going to buy it. If at a particular moment the opportunity doesn't present itself, they'll simply delay the purchase until it's possible. This would apply more to purchases from a specific and exceptional point than those which can be made from multiple providers. Say, my usual lunch spot is closed or out of an item, and I can walk down the street elsewhere (or a drugstore, etc.). However if you're selling hard-to-find exclusive items, or we've got an established relationship and the item isn't something I need right now, I'll simply get it later. On the macro scale, it makes me suspect that shorter interruptions to service don't have a significant regional financial impact. Though this is all armchair economics.

ZeroMinx 14y ago
> people generally have a good idea in mind of what they're going to buy If I may, could I suggest another possibility; People know, and trust, Amazon. "I can't load the shopping site. Maybe it'll work if I reboot." It's quite different for a site that's not as well known as this one.
- robryan 14y ago
  Definitely, we can make sales numbers riding on the back of their reputation in the marketplace on amazon that we can get nowhere near with website sales in the US market. From a customer standpoint their a-z guarantee probably helps a lot.
- jzwinck 14y ago
  That's exactly right. I'd wager that millions of people have bought from Amazon but no other online store. And I doubt any other online store selling physical goods in the US can beat them by that metric. It's not that people won't shop elsewhere but that they literally are unprepared to let themselves do so. One-click shopping is a great idea to keep grandma loyal to the store, because her son probably set it up, and he's not home now.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Yeah, Amazon's got trust, an established relationship, excellent customer service/satisfaction, and a good payment management history, all of which are crucial in online commerce (and for all of that I still prefer not to use them, for what it's worth). Musing over my own post, I can think of instances where the same would not be true. A financial trading platform in particular -- trades are already occurring at volume, and lost time would be lost trades.

sneak 14y ago

This is really insightful and sort of flies in the face of the research about Google's page latencies affecting search volume (even subconsciously). Thanks for sharing a non-obvious data point.

rgovind 14y ago
I would disagree. Search is different from Buying goods. In search, most of the times you are looking for instant answers. Buying goods, you can put off by half an hour and it won't affect you.
magicalist 14y ago
It was actually someone from Amazon themselves, reporting on a/b testing they did, that gave us the numbers of 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. People might wait for Amazon to come back, but if it's slow to navigate back and forth to compare brands, or slow to return search results, or slow to just render the page, you can easily imagine losing some percentage of people or just some percentage of what you could have sold to them. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900

photorized 14y ago

I find this more believable than various claims about how a 10-millisecond page delay results in multimillion loss of revenue.

robfig 14y ago
That's coming from Google, who makes money off page views. Amazon has a different model, so I could believe the latency sensitivity of its business is different.
- lukeschlather 14y ago
  There is an important distinction here between latency and availability. It's possible Amazon could be very sensitive to small changes in latency, while availability isn't that big a deal. After all, a lot of retailers do fine with nightly outages lasting 12 hours or more.