Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

How is it that woot got to be so popular that showing a brown paper bag on their site immediately crashes their servers? Ok, so they don't crash, but they don't respond because of the DOS caused by everyone trying to purchase all at once. Of course, if it were hosted over dialup, that wouldn't be so impressive. But they're not, and I don't get it. How did woot get to be so popular while upsetting so many people when they can't buy something? Ok, so I'm mostly speaking out of frustration, but there are some real issues going on. For example, during the Woot-off last week there were plenty of times I couldn't get it to load. At one point, I saw a BOC (woot fans know what that is), clicked "I want one", then it went back to the previous item saying "Sold out". 30 seconds later the BOC was again on the site, I clicked "I want one", got it added, but the payment timed out. By the time it would actually accept my payment, they we...

I've discovered something this week that I'm working on fixing. What I discovered is this: real-time lookups aren't a good thing. For years now, we've done real-time lookups whenever someone adds a product to their cart and enters a zip code. This allows us to not worry about rate changes and focus on the products. But what it's also meant is we're leaving money on the table. A quick test over the past few days has shown that nearly 10% of the time, UPS's servers aren't returning data. That doesn't seem good to me. There are days where our customer service reps complain about shipping rates taking a long time to load. Those are the times I knew about. But the 10% figure is even without taking the "Nothing returned" into account - this is just "Something useless returned". So, as a fix, I've queried enough to get all the rates now, and I'm rewriting our shipping calculations to run entirely without querying their servers. W...

That's right... I'm attempting HTML validation on our checkout pages. This process is a real pain, but it seems like one of the few places for me to look yet when trying to troubleshoot our MSN customer checkout problems . So far, it's been mostly forgetting to end fonts before the end of a td section, so it hasn't really changed anything. Oh, and forgetting a few # signs at the beginning of colors. I used to be terrible at that. But so far, quite a few errors corrected and nothing in the way of changing the phone overload problems we've been facing. I guess it's good that we're getting record sales yet, but imagine where we'd be if our site visitors could get things to work on their own. Who knows how much business we're losing as a result? I sure don't, but I have a guess, and that guess wouldn't make me happy if I dwelled on it too much instead of looking at other possible causes of the problems. As long as I keep busy, things seem much b...

We've been having some trouble with the checkout process on our sites over the past month. First, we have been preparing a third party integration on ToolBarn (not even Offermatica, as that's been installed and running for a while now without problems) that caused SSL warnings in checkout. This lasted most of a business week, causing sales during that week to seem slightly "soft" (our term for below average.) Secondly, Shoemoney had a $50 coupon for AdCenter (Microsoft's advertising platform for those not familiar with PPC). Well, I got it all up and running, and we immediately started having people calling in saying they were having problems with checkout. The oddball part here - they all have MSN as an ISP, most using MSN Explorer for a browser. So I'm left trying to figure out why. I mean, IE and FireFox are both used in our call center, and we've got the occasional Opera user testing it. I have a Mac to test things on as well. I also use Linux, so yet ...