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Comment by granos | Hacker News Reader

Does something like this actually cost them a huge amount in sales or do people know enough about the internet today to just come back in a few hours and try again? I know that personally, if I'm buying from Amazon, I would just come back later and try again.

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I have a friend that worked in Amazon for a while. He told me that after outages are repaired, there is a spike in sales but that it is never enough to cover the loses. The revenue does just disappear.

could be even worse. On the Internet it's not like some corner store you can check later, as it's still just as convenient next time: everything is a Google search away. So everyone who goes through the trouble of figuring out where else they can buy from - might just end up as those other people's customers for good!

I'd be curious to see the numbers on that sort of thing. I know for some people that is the case, but i almost feel.. locked in to Amazon. With free 2 day shipping, and decent customer service if i have problems/etc, i am not likely to shop elsewhere.

Is it a strange indicator that this feels more like lockin to me, than loyalty? I have no idea what that means.. or how to change the conceptual impression.

> Is it a strange indicator that this feels more like lockin to me, than loyalty?

My hunch would be that your subconcious is telling you loyalty towards a huge faceless corporation feels weird. If it was a local store with people you could connect your positive experience to, my guess is you'd have no issue calling it loyalty, even if that store was part of an equally big corporation.

That may be an accurate hunch. I feel loyalty towards Costco, because i hear good things about their employees and know multiple people who want to work there.

With that said, it's hard to say if that's because i hear good things, or because it's a physical store with people i see.

Compare that to Amazon, and i rarely hear good things about their staff treatment. Despite having a good experience with Amazon. .. to be clear, i just don't hear good things.. not implying that i hear lots of bad.

I'm up to about 65/35 loyalty/lock-in. It's almost like I keep expecting them as a faceless BigCo to fuck something up and piss me off ... but they never do. The very few minor issues I've had with orders they've resolved beyond my expectations. It's .. hard to stay mad.

This is in stark contrast to many other faceless BigCo's that I've stopped using entirely, or only use out of necessity but loathe every interaction with. (eBay, PayPal, Comcast, Verizon, etc.)

Having just recently bought from a couple other places online for the first time in a while, I'm not worried about Amazon losing customers long term. I had forgotten what it was like to have your package take a week and a half to get to you. If I was another e-commerce store, I'd be very, very worried about competing with Amazon's logistics machine.

How many people actually do this though? I rather wait for them to be online instead of registering my card information someplace else. I can buy stuff from almost any site as long as they accept Paypal but many want to store the card information themselves, understandable from their perspective but not from mine.

I wonder if this says a lot about immediacy and consumerism. Do people go elsewhere or does time permit them to realize they don't really need/want what they were about to buy?

Impulse purchases at the click of a mouse have really changed the way I personally consume. Anyone aware of any studies on the impact of instant feedback?

I'm not too proud to admit that a large number of my amazon purchases are low-price impulse buys. I'd imagine I'm far from alone in this.

An reason I used to use to stop that behavior in myself was "oh, it will take a few days to get here". It's difficult to use that logic these days. If one day Amazon could get it to me in an hour without extra fees I'm in trouble.

Is getting it to you in 2 hours without extra fees not good enough? I feel like we're basically there. https://primenow.amazon.com/

That's a pretty short list of US cities to make the claim 'basically there.' https://primenow.amazon.com/onboard?sourceUrl=%2F

It's too bad they haven't expanded faster - Walmart just barely rolled out their curb side pickup service where I live - if Amazon had made it here with same day delivery even just a few months ago we'd be customers for life, but as it is we'll probably stick with Walmart for groceries even when Amazon does eventually get here. (better the devil you know, etc.)

Amazon and Steam are really the only places I impulse buy.

I'm sure if you totaled up my Amazon purchases and my Steam library it's cost me thousands.

You can total up one of those here: https://steamdb.info/calculator/

I find that interesting because Amazon is a "no impulse buy zone" for me. Everything I buy there is meticulously planned. It is probably an effect of living in Hawaiʻi - shipping can kill a good deal very quickly (and Amazon, while I'm at it, you know where I live - stop telling me that the item is free to ship when it isn't!).

Amazon doesn't deliver most physical things to my (current) home, so all of my purchases are Kindle (impulse) buys. I'm guessing that for a lot of international readers the Kindle Store is the most important part of Amazon.

I'm working in Antarctica and everything takes at minimum 3-4 weeks to arrive (often 6) after ordering, so it's really taken the starch out of impulse buys.

Did you buy Minecraft by any chance? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822993

I didn't, but it's most likely at McMurdo (the largest U.S. base on the continent).

Oh man Steam sales cause ramen dinners in our house. The Wife and I are equally guilty.

I solved this problem by putting it on the wishlist and buying everything I still want at the end of the week.

So, just for one point on a graph... I didn't really need the Star Trek salt and pepper shakers and Star Trek ice cube trays that I bought last night. If Amazon search had been down last night instead of this morning, it's a safe bet I wouldn't have bought them.

Considering case studies like "300 million dollar button" [1], they are likely losing insane amounts of money.

[1] https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/

If it happened during peak hours I would expect that, but not in the middle of the night.

Middle of the night? I was trying to buy something this morning on the east coast and the site wasn't working.

They might still lose revenues from potential impulsive purchase

It just happened to me, I was trying to search a book and want to buy it, but since I can't search, I didn't. And now I don't want to buy it anymore

This is why I always put books on the save-for-later list for at least a few days.

This is why I almost always put everything (bought online) on the save-for-later list for a few days.

This is a big one, a lot of Amazon is designed around making it really easy to make impulsive purchases. One-click purchases? One-day/same-day delivery? The myriad of suggested/related items on every page between search and checkout? I can see where there'd be a big drop of orders that would never be placed again.

I really agree with you

I think it comes down to how you define "a huge amount in sales". Let's optimistically say they lose 1% of sales over a 4 hour period although it could certainly be much higher. Is 1% of Amazon's sales a huge amount for them? Not in the short term. Is that absolute amount a huge amount for me, personally, or most of the other companies in the world? It sure is.

I'd guess they're probably losing more like 90% of sales while search is down. Basically every purchase I make on Amazon starts with a search.

Usually my Amazon purchases start with a Google search that links me directly to the Amazon product page. I rarely use the actual Amazon search.

In addition, many search-initiated purchases will be postponed, not abandoned. I'm sure they lose a ton of sales during this period, but I doubt it's as high as 90%.

If there is no spike of sales, all hours of sales is worth the same, and assuming Amazon makes 100B per year in online sales, then it seems like a considerable loss, but still a drop in the bucket when compared to their total revenue:

  (1 - (365 * 24 - 4) / (365 * 24)) = 0.000456621...
  0.000456621... * 100,000,000,000 = $45,662,100.4566...

I don't think anyone suggested that 4 hours would make up a sizable part of yearly revenue. That's not the point.

As another poster mentioned, even with the post-outage spike in sales from folks coming back to get what they wanted an hour ago, they lose those impulse sales forever.

but if that 100B annual sales includes periodic down-time, and this down-time is within the normal annual amount, then you are double counting down-times...

And a lot of people will do also.

But some won't. They'll either be buying on a whim (and the mood passes), or buy from a competitor. Those are lost sales that aren't coming back.

There are people around who never buy on a whim, but there are also a lot of people that buy stuff because the thought crosses their mind, forget about it, then remember when it turns up several days later. These aren't always things you "need" strictly speaking.

As to competition I'd name Jet.com, Target, and Walmart as being major ones. I buy a LOT of stuff from Target these days using the Red Card (effectively 5% pays for the tax, and free delivery on all purchases).

Sort of. If the brand is good (e.g. Amazon), people will come back later to buy.

On the other hand, you can model some buying as periodic, not need-based. I go to the grocery store when I need food, but I go to J Crew once every six months. If I'm traveling this June, I'll delay my trip until July, so while the revenue isn't "lost", it's pushed into the future. My next trip is then in January, not December, and at this point, J Crew has lost one month of my sales forever.

There's a similar effect for many items at Amazon. I only spend so much time shopping, so if I can't do it now, there's some opportunity they miss out on in the future. The aggregate ends up looking like revenue that's lost forever.

they say they lose 1% of revenue from every extra 100ms of page load time, how much do you think they would lose from 4 hours of downtime?

Rule of thumb: differences of orders of magnitude result in differences of kind, not degree.

Behavior over 100ms can't be compared to behavior over hours. It's possible that it's true, but it's unlikely.

Not only are they losing money, they're giving customers who otherwise never would, motivation to seek out competition they might not come back from.

I seem to recall reading an article or post previously about how they don't lose nearly as much as most people expect for this very reason. They would see a dip in sales when it was down, but it was more or less made up with a slight sales spike when it came back up. If I can find the article I'll be sure to share.

I was doing some late night search for a purchase in Amazon and saw the problem. Tried couple times and gave up. Now I lost the mood to continue. Yeah, it does cost loss of sales.

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