Melville House Books

Technical glitches are continuing at Amazon.com, to a degree that “have stopped some holiday shoppers from completing purchases,” according to a Reuters wire story by Martha Graybow. One analyst, Gomez, Inc., which “tracks Internet shopping,” said that during the last two weeks it was “unable to complete a transaction on Amazon about 12 percent of the time.” “There have been a number of glitches,” said a Vanderbilt University professor, Donna Hoffman, who co-directs the school’s Sloan Center for Internet Retailing. She says, however, that “even if Amazon shoppers have encountered technical problems, most of them would be likely to come back to the site and complete their shopping after the glitches are resolved.” A stock analyst, Martin Pyykkonen of Janco Partners, agrees with Hoffman that the problems may not be “a drag on the company’s overall sales,” but he also notes the glitches have “probably been more than just insignificant.” Amazon spokesman Craig Berman, meanwhile, who angered some critics last week when he acknowledged a major outage only by saying “complex systems have problems from time to time,” denied that there have been further problems and would not comment on the impact on sales. The company’s stock, meanwhile, climbed two percent.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.