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Cybershoppers Bring Down Yahoo

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by Felix Salmon
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Nov 27 2007 12:00am EDT

Cybershoppers Bring Down Yahoo

The WSJ tells us today that "Yahoo's popular e-commerce system buckled under the strain of a surge in online shopping" starting at the ridiculously early hour of 5:30 a.m. EDT yesterday. Help me out here: isn't the point of "cyber Monday" that people do shopping from their work computers? What kind of person does shopping from a work computer at 5:30 in the morning Eastern time? And how can there possibly be so many of those people as to overwhelm Yahoo's Merchant Solutions business?

There are also two broader lessons, here, I think. The first is that the internet continues to build small, long-tail businesses – which means that even if consumer spending remains robust this holiday season, the proportion of that spending going to the big retail chains is likely to fall.

The second is the one made by Dan Gross on Saturday:

The American consumer, exhausted, pinched, indebted, and fearful, is likely to slow down and may eventually collapse—just not in the next few weeks.

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