Auction Extensions/Credits for Site Access Issues 11-28-05

[amy]

Dear Valued Overstock.com Auctions Users,

As you may have heard, online retailers are beginning to refer to the Monday after Thanksgiving as "Cyber Monday" in response to the overwhelming online shopping boom that typically occurs on this day. According to the Nielsen//NetRatings, Overstock.com Shopping is currently the #6 online shopping destination. Naturally, Overstock Auctions is experiencing an extraordinary increase in traffic as well. We had an approximately 20% increase in unique visitors this weekend over last weekend. The new blended Auctions and Shopping search design we released last week has sent even more potential bidders over to Overstock Auctions than ever before.

As a result of all this growth, our servers were straining under the heavy load. Many users experienced O No pages yesterday. The site improvements that we launched recently to handle the increasing load has helped, but the high traffic made it clear that more changes were needed -- immediately.

In order to combat these challenges, the development team moved the search and browse features to new more powerful servers that are designed to handle higher loads. We have also improved the underlying code that serves up department homepages, improving both performance and relevancy of the items displayed.

The work that the engineering team did yesterday (as well as over the last few weeks) has made a vast improvement -- in fact, the site is now responding faster and serving fewer O No pages than it has in months!

We are thrilled with the improved performance of the site, especially during the busiest shopping season of the year. However, Overstock recognizes the difficulties that sellers face when there are severe issues with the site. To compensate, the Auctions team has done the following:

1. On November 28th at 7pm MST, all open auctions were extended for 24 hours beyond their original end time.

2. For every auction that closed without a sale between 7am and 7pm MST on November 28th, all listing fees have been credited back to the seller as general credits.
I thank you for your support of Overstock Auction during this exciting time of growth for us all.

Sincerely,

David Wellman
Director Auction Development
Overstock Auctions

http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=11149

[bargainbloodhound]

Many users experienced O No pages yesterday.

Yesterday? I've been experiencing them since O auctions started 14 months ago. 

For every auction that closed without a sale between 7am and 7pm MST on November 28th, all listing fees have been credited back to the seller as general credits.

I wish that certain other large auction sites would do this when their site experienced problems... 

Comment 2  unlike certain other sites, O credited sellers' accounts immediately not next year.

I think I'll be nice to O (for today only) since they issued  credits to sellers.

[rossellini]

I was surprised and elated to see the credits. Way to go O!