Search Engine Placement

Created by Shop.org, the “holiday” is considered to be the first official online shopping day. Just like Black Monday where retailers offer sometimes ridiculous deals to lure shoppers in, on Cyber Monday online stores offer incredible discounts and savings to those buying items that day.

The day brought in over $700 million in sales, up from $608 million in 2006 and $485 million in 2005. Despite it being ranked as only the 12^th most popular online shopping day (according to Business Week’s Robert Hof), retailers expect their numbers to continue to rise as the day becomes more known.

Although Cyber Monday happened almost perfectly well, there was at least one glitch with the online shopping. Yahoo Merchant Solutions’ shopping cart software crashed on Cyber Monday, leading to a dramatic loss of revenue for over 10,000 merchants using the Yahoo software.

Beginning at 8:31am (PST) a message on the Yahoo Merchant Solutions System Status page characterized the problem as an “Error Message During Checkout.” As the day went on, this messaged continued for many people trying to checkout. Nothing else was updated until 5:12pm (PST), saying that Yahoo was investigating the issue. The system wasn’t fully repaired and running until 11:00pm (PST). Yahoo’s only explanation of the mess up was that they had experienced “technical glitches.”

For once, Yahoo is leading the pack with it’s new release of Yahoo Pipes. The new service essentially allows users to ‘remix’ their own custom RSS feeds based on existing data on the web. Yahoo provides this explanation of their latest toy:

“Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.”

For more detailed explanations on the tool, check out posts by fellow bloggers Tim O’Reilly, Anil Dash, and Nik Cubrilovic.