So has everyone enjoyed Myer's boxing day sale online???
They have so many problems with their site it's become ridiculous! I sent them 5 messages over a period of 4 weeks telling them of the problems and they never did a thing and now their biggest sale is on their site has crashed completely! Myer need to pull their head out of their ass and listen to their customers. How about they fire the ones who run the site.
Time to find out what went wrong & fire those who were paid to know better
Bernie Brooks probably wouldn't fire himself….
It has been showing "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with our website" for the whole of Boxing Day. However that error message has been showing up pretty quickly. On an overloaded website (like TGG right now and Colorado last night/this morning) you'll expect very slow response.
My theory is — something is broken in their backend for the boxing day sale. Rather than overwhelmed by the traffic, something is just not working when they flip over the switch to show the Boxing day sales content. That's why they just keep the site down while someone fixing it up — be it engineers / IT department or the content manager.
HOWEVER it's also Christmas / Boxing day so maybe some key personnel is not around, and the site just stayed down for the whole day. What a shame.
"It has been showing "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with our website" for the whole of Boxing Day."
That's false. It worked for me all morning until I finished around 9:30am.
It could be an error message that comes up when they're unable to communicate with the database? (database connector exception). That's all I can think of since the site is still reachable.
"We expect to have it [the website] up in the next couple of hours, maybe earlier" Mr Brookes told Fairfax Media on Boxing Day.
"Both IBM internationally and in Australia, and most of our IT team, are working furiously to get it right," Mr Brookes said.
DJ's seems to be coping just fine ;)
U are right bro.. Friend of mine used to work for Myer website from Melbourne and now it is outsourced to India..
some Asian countries, not country.
Country
The quality isnt anything to do with Asia etc. Its the same quality as there service in store here in Oz.
Myer thinks that cutting costs saves them money, that's all they seem to know how to do, and they are always first to claim that GST exemption on imports are killing their business - fools
Here is some other ways they mismanage their business
I don't see security guards at most retailers, are their goods just waking out the door too? Do you have particular insight into myer or just giving some free advice?
Security staff, not security guards - he means the plain clothes undercover shoppers most people don't know are security at all.
"Senior (HO) management walks around store, so store increases staff on that day. Cut backs on other days to keep staff "costs" on target. Hint shop only when management walk thrus are on, to get best service."
Have you ever worked in retail or any job? That is very common. Every place I work has more staff than typical when the superiors are present. They may not even need to roster more but change their lunch breaks so they are all present at the same time. You would do exactly the same thing if you were the Manager so I don't see why you are complaining. You may say you would do different things but that just shows you have no idea how the stores work.
Common yes, however when a business has as many complaints about service, instead of taking the walk around as being representative of your business as Myer management seem to do (as they dont do anything to improve things), then this is an issue.
A simple check of complaints still being received, and then a management check of payroll/staffing would show the increase in staff then subsequent decreases during/after walk arounds.
Of course if there have been no issues this wouldnt be required.
Like all management issues with customers, it indicates a potential problem that needs a little investigation.
All these issues that I mention have been raised here on Ozbargain for years.
Oh and insights into any business dont need to come from others in the industry (retail) they can come from many sources. However to put your mind at rest, I do have this, plus contacts in Myer. (not HO)
If you do have HO contacts, you might like to assist by at least pointing out, they might want to look a little closer than they seem to do now, rather than follow their bosses mantra of GST on imports being their problem, or that interest rates are driving their customers not to shop.
Reminds me of the retail legendary story (although while actually probably a myth) about the Store owner on a main highway preparing for an upcoming recession, decided to save money by turning off the neon advertising signs, being happy he did so, as trade dropped off.
Hint shop only when management walk thrus are on, to get best service.
any specials on crystal balls?
A lot of stores have under cover security officers but rely on uniformed centre security. Try to steal something and see who grabs you :P
Also more staff are on the day before a visit as they are want the store to be extremely tidy, generally late afternoon the day before is best.
As for the returns policy you are right, the managers are more concerned about customer feedback than anything else but there are limits.
running off http://www.iprimus.com.au/ now thats an Australian company. What do you have against asians trent86?
They have their website hosted in iPrimus' IP range, but it does not mean that they have not out-sourced their IT department and web operation / support to other countries. Obviously I have no idea either who is providing the IT support for them (or maybe they are doing it in-house?). Out-sourced operations in Asia are also more likely to work during the Christmas break than locals.
Lol I have nothing against Asians, especially considering my girlfriend is Asian. All I was saying it they probably have their It systems run from Asia to save money rather than use an Australian one, and if their is a problem it makes it 10 times harder to fix it
actually if it was run from asia it would in all likelihood stay up and get a much faster response with troubleshooting.
U are right bro.. Friend of mine used to work for Myer website from Melbourne and now it is outsourced to India..
Engage your brain. What continent do you think India is part of?
they all look alike lol (joke from irish imigrant from the office)
Agreed. I have been checking the website every so often. Serious fail on Myer's part.
Maybe it's just Karma for Bernie Brookes comments about the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Anyway, they have it all under control at Myer ..well sooner or later
Who knows! All I know if it has had problems for months and never been fixed. It's been 6 hrs now and no further info from Myer but site is still down
What are you planning to buy from Myer's website?
Not much anymore got my shorts and singlets from live clothing instead
10's of millions of dollars to improve their website and online presence? Really?
The guy who works at Myer that signed off on the company in charge of this development should be fired and anyone else who is responsible should walk also. If I was the CEO heads would roll. How embarassing for Myer.
It isn't 1994 and these types of problems should not happen….
Yes, 20 years is long enough to get an online presence properly sorted you would think.
Dick Smith website has been slow as hell today. I gave up trying to check prices. Thought they must be the worst performer until I saw this story on the evening news. Go Myer!
Myer site is up again but for how long?
Lol well I spoke to soon. Been 5 mins and my page hasn't gone from 1-2 yet lol
Glad its up. Mega savings scanpan was $129 now $129 saving of a big fat ZERO
http://m.myer.com.au/shop/mobile/mystore/au-scanpan-classic-…
Lol yeah another one of Myer's constant problems through the year showing the wrong sale price or the same price omg it's actually hilarious how bad it is
Pardon my website ignorance but what exactly can be taking so long for them?
Do you just switch servers when it is overcrowded? Or are there insufficient staff so they are just waiting until the traffic dies down and thus returns to operation?
It's more of a technical design issue than anything.
There's quite a few points where shopping sites can experience bottlenecks, when this happens you either get: slowdown, completely unreachable sites, reachable sites but unusable.
So, in the sales period, when you have a single server or a server cluster that isn't scalable and you have a lot of users - something breaks.
When a single server is overcrowded, you want to scale to multiple servers, but to do this you already have to use a shopping site software that can support this and have it configured before the event or use a shopping site service that does this automatically for you.
Made the news:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/shoppers-go-on-spending…
This came despite a major mishap with the Myer website which was down most of today - a major embarrassment on the biggest sales day of the Australian calender.
honestly, the only australian retailer that has got it right from the start, not only from its vast content but just overall good….is JBHIFI. i have never had an issue and their content is close to what they have in store.
myer and DJs are so crap.
Agree, as basic as it appears, JB's site does seem to work behind the scenes. Although there can be a glitch or two but these normally work in your favour LOL.
Down again … pathetic
Yes it's down again. According to this updated article on SMH,
Mr Brookes … said the latest problem had nothing to do with capacity, or the ability of the website to handle heavy customer traffic. Rather, it had to do with an application "not talking" to the server and causing the web pages to time out.
"Both IBM internationally and in Australia, and most of our IT team, are working furiously to get it right," Mr Brookes said. "There's 27 days of stocktake sale and there's $175 million worth of stock, so we don't expect our customers to miss out. Of course it doesn't excuse the fact that there's a software error."
So basically,
From the article:
Mr Brookes said online sales made up less than 1 per cent of the retailer's business
That's understandable when the site is not even working on the busiest day of the year.
That's understandable when the site is not even working on the busiest day of the year.
Mr Brookes needs someone like you on his staff, bleeding and basically obvious but he cant seem to understand basics
"Mr Brookes said online sales made up less than 1 per cent of the retailer's business
That's understandable when the site is not even working on the busiest day of the year."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
BAM!
When your website is so slow (when it is up), you cannot sell - hence 1%
I saw the word IBM.
You can consider that case closed.
Yes 1% on a normal day I would say but alot more on boxing day sales. This guy is a twit
These retailers (Myer, HN, etc…) should quit complaining about the GST threshold and build themselves a decent 'web presence and distribution warehouse' business model before they get beaten to the punch locally (e.g. Amazon setting up shop in Australia). They seem content to complain and stick to the old business model; if they do not hurry up and get with the times, they will well and truly lose out!
It's probably because they reached the maximum number of database connections and the other connections are in a time-wait state (not timed out but blocked for use). This is relatively easy to fix lol :~P
just walked through myer in less than 20 minutes. nothing worth buying as per usual
and today 27/12 11.51am, down AGAIN.
wtf.. seriously.. for a name like myer.
CEO should sack someone.
update:
their latest website message says "closed until further notice".
hooray…. finally they gave up fixing it
their online team is really saying "F@#$ this S#@$"
I can't believe how pathetic this is… I didn't even want to shop online today, I wanted to read their gift card t&cs.
Anyway, DJs got my business this year as they had the Spencer and Rutherford bag I wanted for $60 cheaper than Myer did. If I hadn't gotten a Myer gift card for xmas I wouldn't bother with Myer at all. Myer fail.
one of their message (The Age Link) says:
"The Team ARE" .. :)
Just saw someone's post about pricing error on their FB
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10200853414168708&se…
Had a similar experience with HN. Was ready to buy an item, but when I tried to sign up for the newsletter to get the $5 voucher, it wouldn't work due to an unexpected error. I asked the online chat support staff and they said it wasn't working because there were 4,000 people using the website which is too many! Wonder how many people are on ebay/amazon right now. I bought my item from the Overstock.com ebay store out of principle after that.
Wonder how many people are on ebay/amazon right now
The Verge: Amazon sold 426 items per second in run-up to Christmas
Not sure whether Myer's website has managed to sell 426 items in a day yesterday…
Give them a break - 426 for the week or month would be reasonable for Myer!
8.15pm AET, website still down. They must be thinking about lawsuits by now if it's not an inhouse problem as I was led to believe from one of the news articles above.
Myer Website still down…
Has anyone ever known a site to be down for so long? How could this possibly be with all the tech heads out there who know everything about this crap, obviously Myer is asking the wrong people to fix the problem.
It's most likely because the tech heads who originally worked on the site have long gone and they (either Myer or IBM) have gone through several generations of staff in terms of staff turnover for a long project. (It's quite common to have 30-40% p.a. turnover in difficult IT projects) So most of the existing engineers don't know the code and were just hacking at it to make it work. It gets worse if the project started in one country and got handed over to another, and it has all become a house of cards that has collapsed on them.
It's quite common to have 30-40% p.a. turnover in difficult IT projects
Not to mention consulting firms (looking at you, IBM!) having tendency of complicating the projects, making trivial cases difficult. You just have to use the latest J2EE/.NET multi-layer platform to re-write your own over optimised content management system that guarantee no one else has the experience, and charge your client an arm and leg for it…
This is a relatively easy problem to fix for someone who knows what they are doing. You could temporarily fix it by changing one line in a configuration file :P
You know the exact stack that Myer is using that one line of configuration file change is enough? In your blog you suggested that they should tune their Apache and PHP — a bit hard when they are running IIS.
I wouldn't make any more suggestions here if I were you.
I think you've missed the point i'm making in the blog post. At the time I wrote it people were saying that Myers site was down and the post is geared towards possible issues with shopping sites in the Christmas period and how downtime can be avoided with proper testing, maintenance and scalable design. A lot of the points are very valid.
I'm not claiming that I know the ins and outs of Myers setup, nor is my blog post aimed at denigrating Myer at all. A lot of the points are valid generalisations about the various problems that can come up when hosting your own shopping site.
You can easily replace the words apache+PHP with IIS+C#. The fact is that the same diagnostic steps apply regardless of the stack used and the same sort of problems can occur. However, I have reworded it for you :~)
In my mind at least, it seems like the fault could be a database connectivity problem as indicated by the statement that:
"Mr Brookes, who took part in a phone hook-up at 3.30am after the Myer website encountered technical difficulties, said the latest problem had nothing to do with capacity, or the ability of the website to handle heavy customer traffic. Rather, it had to do with an application ''not talking'' to the server and causing the web pages to time out."
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/retail/myer-website-crashes-d…
In the recent past, using pooled connections was not common and what happens is literally, the number of database connections gets saturated and they sit in timeout-wait for long periods of time meaning no new applications can connect, meaning no new customers can connect. The simple fix to this is to reduce the timeout-wait period down as much as feasible - a one line fix. If connection pooling is used, the chance of this occurring go down, unless there's some internal fault in the software that has control over the connection pool. Then you would look at something else like a database bottleneck (timeouts?), in which case scaling up is needed, but they have stated that capacity is not the issue.
ditto - funny how one can arrive to the assumption so easily.
Irrespectively, IT team needs review from lost face n $$$ in the busy day.
hahaha. Site totally down now. Running a reliable, scalable, tested site is basic stuff from a point of view of IT architecture. Be it PHP, Java, whatever it boils down to basic competency of the people managing it. In this day and age, someone like Myer not being able to keep its website up and running must have some very serious problems in its senior management.
Worst comment ever.
With most likely millions of lines of codes, server clusters, firewalls and load balancers, multiple configuration set-ups, certificates and anything else gummed over the years. This could be a needle in a haystack that requires serious debugging or hardware/set-up changes - or lots of system and code re-design that would take a LONG time.
This isn't a blog site and quite likely (I want to say obviosuly) would not be an easy fix.
I actually feel sorry for Myer. I know it's their job etc but it's not like they are intentionally doing this.
Myer deserves to be punished for the comments of Bernie Brookes' regarding GST on overseas purchases.
Also, it's a bit hypocritical of him to say Australian jobs will be lost if the low threshold stays in place, but he's quite happy to outsource most of the IT work overseas.
Brooke's and Gerry Harvey were reluctant to sell anything online not that ago. Both of them secretly despise online shopping.
Hey man, you've hit the nail on the head! They whinged like crybabies when consumers found a way to get a better bargain and were more than happy to offshore the back office so that the executives could get their fat cheques bonus!
very true.
"Gerry Harvey admits that his wife and family have shopped online for cheaper goods."
http://www.news.com.au/finance/gerry-harveys-cheap-shot-at-w…
If the GST regime for online purchases reverted back to what it was a decade ago I wouldn't mind. It used to be $1k for ordinary air mail packages, or $250 for 'air cargo' which included anything sent by express air mail. I got stung on it once ($700 camera) and never again used express air mail.
The current system ($1k limit for all packages) simplifies the system but actually increased the GST threshold by 4 times.
There have been suggestions that the tax free limit should be as little as $25. Good luck collecting $2.50 in taxes on a package in an efficient manner. If it changed back to $250 I wouldn't mind at all.
Why do people go into MYER?
As a tight customer, I haven't been convinced to step in their stores once in many years. I think I was in there to get some toys on clearance about 6 years ago.
Reading about this Bernie Brookes guy just makes me less inclined (if that is possible).
I went into Myer on Boxing Day in search of a new lounge suite. Myer used to sell them, but not any more. Sorry Myer, I can't buy what you're not willing to offer. A suburban furniture store received my $2000 order the next day.
I did not know this. Probably another area they cannot compete.
They still sell beds. The ones I saw sitting outside the store on Boxing Day were all being slept upon by men obviously waiting for women to return. Wish I took a picture.
men live a tough life. no break all year around
Did anyone else notice the Myer boss say online sales would only account for 1%!!! Well why do you want the government to add GST to it then!
He said Myer's online sales accounted for 1% of their total sales not overseas retailers' online sales accounted for 1%.
He also said OVERSEAS online sales should have GST added to them.
That's what I was saying lol
They took down the whole website completely on Dec 27 and 28, even the normal content like catalog, Ts and Cs, About and Contact us, etc.
No One Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM
We will see this time, after IBM screwed up Queensland Health a few years before.
There were huge crowds at Myer's Adelaide sale. Security guards at the escalators to avoid overloading them. I went in looking for a few particular items and bought… absolutely nothing. A suburban furniture store got my $2000 purchase a day later.
Two things: No one gets fired for buying IBM, but IBM isn't the same IBM as in the 1980s. They're outsourcing to the cheapest contractor as fast as anyone else. The other is that I can't help but feel it's not in Myer's interests to see their internet site take off, therefore they provide little support for it. Think about the many millions of dollars they have tied up in real estate around Australia, and how much they have to lose if Australians really adopt online shopping as the default shopping option.
At the very least I hope Myer fires all management involved in developing their online experience. Management takes all the credit from the lower ranked workers when things work out great, so I think it's only fair management takes the blame when something goes wrong.
Myer has updated it's status saying. "We have now found the problem" Omg lol they only just found the problem, and are now going to test it for a few days first before activating it again for us. Also Myer said they would offer special deals just for us for our patience so I will be interested to see what that is
Thanks. I think the best way to keep up the official info is to check their Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/myer.mystore
For example the latest update:
We've identified the cause of the issues and are now implementing the fixes. We'll take a few days to test everything before we bring the website back up to make sure everything is working and stable.
Once we're back up we'll have some extra special offers to thank everyone for their patience!
I suggest 40-50% off skincare.
myer overpriced to the max scummers. a sale would bring it down to just above retail
The electronics stuff I normally look at was indeed heavily overpriced.
"Myer is striving to limit the damage of its major website crash, apologising to frustrated online customers and offering specials and free postage when it is back online."
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/myer-tries-…
Yeah it still has problems!
I thought they fixed their bloody site.
Got this message for 20 secs before being redirected.
"Thousands of customers are shopping the Stocktake Sale right now! Hang in there… you're almost at the front of the queue. Thank you for being so patient."
Yep, you and me both. Then when that message finally disappeared, I keep getting "it seems we are having some technical difficulties at the moment" when I try to click on anything.
Boxing Day 2014 at 9AM — good to see that Myer's website is holding up well so far this year. I guess they have learned from their mistake last year and have improved throughout the year (according to their Alexa ranking).
I wish I could say the same. I can shop all I want, just not make a purchase as my "address is not supported" and there is no way I am going in to the store to pick up my order when it is over $100 and could be delivered free.
Frustrating.
You are right though, it is a huge step up from last year.
The same exact thing happened to clickfrenzy the first (& 2nd?) time around…I agree that it's pretty pathetic if the ones Myer use to set up their site for their "SUPER SALE" aren't capable of doing so. $$$$$$$$$$ lost for Myer due to inept I.T. support. Time to find out what went wrong & fire those who were paid to know better.