4 ms·

Someone probably will get fired. Last quarter amazon earned $20.58bn from product sales. So 4 hours of that is $38,000,000.

by hmate9 10y ago

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
I highly doubt search equates to all of their sales during a period. That would seem odd and would indicate no one uses their navigation at all.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  Also, Amazon is established enough, and has few enough comparable competitors, that anyone whose search breaks is liable to just try again tomorrow. Still, some people who do go somewhere else, or are less likely to try Amazon in the future. I'd be surprised if this wasn't at least a multi-million dollar mistake.
- cwilkes 10y ago
  I never do. Going to their homepage is like seeing the dog's breakfast. It is a complete mess of whatever passed an a/b test of increasing sales. It is like they reached a local maxima but it is on St Crappy's Peak. If I go to Amazon.com I just go to the search bar and refine from there. So I guess I use their "navigation" in the form of their groupings of features on the left side.
deleted 10y ago
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dspillett 10y ago
Unless there was deliberate action (skipping procedure in a way that a person has been warned and disciplined about previously) there will be no firing. Any calculation based on the hours down needs to be reduced to account for people finding products by other means (already saved for later in their basket, direct links, searches via external search engines).
mdjt 10y ago
This is so inaccurate. There is no way that the distribution of product sales is constant over time of day, day of the week, month of the year, etc.
mrdrozdov 10y ago
Firing seems like a toxic move, especially without knowing what happened. I'd like to think that Amazon has multiple layers of alerts built into place for situations like this, so this was probably a complex bug (perhaps a perfect storm of faulty configurations like what happened with Google's Cloud offering not too long ago). I'd say that number is probably a ceiling on their losses, and that the actual number should be much lower. I'm super curious if non-tech news organizations will pick up this story, in which case the biggest hit could be from the PR. That being said, it doesn't seem like such a bad time to go down.

Someone probably will get fired. Last quarter amazon earned $20.58bn from product sales. So 4 hours of that is $38,000,000.

by hmate9 10y ago

Someone probably will get fired. Last quarter amazon earned $20.58bn from product sales. So 4 hours of that is $38,000,000.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

I highly doubt search equates to all of their sales during a period. That would seem odd and would indicate no one uses their navigation at all.

jessriedel 10y ago
Also, Amazon is established enough, and has few enough comparable competitors, that anyone whose search breaks is liable to just try again tomorrow. Still, some people who do go somewhere else, or are less likely to try Amazon in the future. I'd be surprised if this wasn't at least a multi-million dollar mistake.
cwilkes 10y ago
I never do. Going to their homepage is like seeing the dog's breakfast. It is a complete mess of whatever passed an a/b test of increasing sales. It is like they reached a local maxima but it is on St Crappy's Peak. If I go to Amazon.com I just go to the search bar and refine from there. So I guess I use their "navigation" in the form of their groupings of features on the left side.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dspillett 10y ago

Unless there was deliberate action (skipping procedure in a way that a person has been warned and disciplined about previously) there will be no firing. Any calculation based on the hours down needs to be reduced to account for people finding products by other means (already saved for later in their basket, direct links, searches via external search engines).

mdjt 10y ago

This is so inaccurate. There is no way that the distribution of product sales is constant over time of day, day of the week, month of the year, etc.

mrdrozdov 10y ago

Firing seems like a toxic move, especially without knowing what happened. I'd like to think that Amazon has multiple layers of alerts built into place for situations like this, so this was probably a complex bug (perhaps a perfect storm of faulty configurations like what happened with Google's Cloud offering not too long ago). I'd say that number is probably a ceiling on their losses, and that the actual number should be much lower. I'm super curious if non-tech news organizations will pick up this story, in which case the biggest hit could be from the PR. That being said, it doesn't seem like such a bad time to go down.