Monday, Monday

I didn’t feel like writing about CyberMonday, but it seems to have become the thing to do. Several people have already written about it, and although some of the opinions are interesting, a number of others are very lightweight, despite coming from sources that ought to dig deeper. So I am going to write something about this “homegrown festival of electronic consumerism,” a true tradition :).

Oh Monday morning, Monday morning couldn’t guarantee That Monday evening you would still be here with me

I wonder: if Cybermonday is so bad, why does it keep drawing a crowd? And why do people buy anyway, wait anxiously for midnight to arrive, pull out their credit cards, and start complaining? Why, if it is such a disaster, are there people who worry so much about this event and ask whether our country is ready to hold an event of this kind? National computing pride? The idea that if they had asked me, I would have done it better?

Monday Monday, can’t trust that day, Monday Monday, sometimes it just turns out that way

Everybody hates Monday, even Mama Cass, so why are we surprised that we hate Monday, and Cyber Monday even more?

But let’s get to the point. This Monday and Tuesday, for the third time, the Santiago Chamber of Commerce organized an event called CyberMonday, an imitation of the initiative of the same name in the United States.

Around this time of year, up north, there is a retail event with an ominous name: Black Friday. The fourth Thursday of November is a holiday in the United States, Thanksgiving Day, and department stores take advantage of the Friday and Saturday that follow to offer end-of-season sales. The term originated in the 1960s and was apparently coined by the Philadelphia police, who hated that weekend because of the congestion caused by the shoppers flocking to the downtown stores.

The first CyberMonday in the United States was held in 2005. By then the behavior of online shoppers had been studied, and it turned out that on the Monday after Thanksgiving Day purchases went up on the e-commerce websites of the time. The term first appeared on the site Shop.org.

According to comScore, in 2012 this event meant sales of 1.46 billion dollars. More than the sales of Black Friday itself, which came to 1.042 billion.

Oh Monday morning, you gave me no warning of what was to be Oh Monday Monday, how yould could leave and not take me.

In 2011 the Santiago Chamber of Commerce organized the first edition of Cybermonday for Chile. The first year there were several stumbles, since the sites were not prepared for the event. Still, it was a success and they decided to do it again. According to SERNAC, the national consumer protection agency, in 2012 they received only 73 complaints tied to this event; 9 companies took part that year. In 2012 Cybermonday meant 25 million dollars for Chilean online retail.

Not bad for a single day.

Let’s recap: Cybermonday 2012, 9 companies, sales of 25 million dollars, 73 complaints.

Every other day (every other day), every other day Every other day of the week is fine, yeah

This year is the third, and this time 26 companies took part officially. One site, ABCDIN, reported receiving 600,000 visits in the first half hour, and apparently they ran quite well. That figure is 6 times last year’s, so here we have a case of a company that prepared and was able to withstand the high demand. The same happened with Lan.com, as reported in this piece from Radio Bio Bio

Although the number of complaints went up compared to last year, we are talking about 100 complaints, against 73 in 2012.

The sites that have drawn the most criticism are Falabella and Sodimac, which, despite having announced bigger investments and more preparation, were apparently the ones that failed the most. Other problems reportedly occurred on payment sites such as WebPay.

But whenever monday comes, but whenever monday comes You can find me crying all of the time

So, can we say Cybermonday was a disaster? Can we doubt whether Chile is ready for something like CyberMonday? Can we say nothing has been learned, and that we are repeating a story of failure?

With 100 complaints? Hard to argue. Don’t get me wrong, this goes beyond the technology and the availability of the website. There are the logistics, the quality of the products, prices that are actually deals, etc. But I want to discuss the technological capacity to run an event like this. It is with the criticism on that front, the strictly technical one, that I don’t fully agree. I don’t think the results are as bad as they have been perceived to be.

I think Chile is ready for something like Cybermonday, that the technical capabilities are there. There are companies that have shown they can put together a technological solution adequate to this peak in demand: there are the cases of ABCDIN and Lan.com. I am not saying they had zero failures, they surely had some, but they were able to operate and scale up their capacity to serve.

The other cases mentioned, which draw the most attention because of the size of the companies behind them, are the ones that have raised the alarm. There is a lot to unpack here. These are cases where we are probably looking at a software architecture unsuited to this kind of situation, a classic example of lasagna-style architectures and an apparent lack of technological innovation that seems to be taking its toll. But that is material for another post. I prefer not to judge, since shaking up certain paradigms, or redirecting investment, often requires very big changes, a lot of political maneuvering and a pile of other factors that are not technological.

Besides, there are a number of developers in Chile who are capable of building solutions with solid architectures to run something like Cybermonday. I hope those who had failures this year manage their kinetic intelligence better and turn to the people who know, and worry less about covering their backsides by hiring and buying Acme-brand software.

On the other hand, should we conclude that Cybermonday was a disaster? By any measure, I think not. Despite the sea of tears that is Twitter, remember that it does not reflect reality. In the coming days we will know the sales figures, and I assure you that next year there will be another Cybermonday and it will go better than this year’s, and there will probably be more companies that rise to the occasion, but we will keep on complaining all the same.

And so we don’t see everything quite so black, I leave you with the song by the Mamas and the Papas:

*Remember that you can now read La Naturaleza Del Software, the book (in Spanish):http://www.lnds.net/books/