Monday, July 13, 2009

Store Site Server Maintanence

Just an FYI to you guys, on July 14 to early morning July 15, from 12 midnight to 6 am (EST), we will be conducting system upgrades to increase capacity and help improve store site performance due to the larger than expected increase in store traffic that has been coming in over the last couple of months.


This maintenance period should be pretty much transparent to you, and you will still be able to use the store as normal, but you may not be able to use coupons or gift certificates when placing an order during this time. Also we won't be able to publish out any item page or other changes during this time - not that we would that late at night, but you never know - sometimes I get my best work done at 3:30 in the morning... :-)

2 comments:

Richard J. said...

Do you believe the increase in store traffic is because of B&M stores carrying less anime or a general up-tick in anime buying by fans?

Robert said...

It’s really hard to tell, though I don't think it represents any general up tick in fan purchases, more than likely we are just capturing more market share that is shifting away from others. We’ve seen a fairly substantial up tick in business and site traffic (up around 18%) over the past 90 days, but the R1 market (at least for paid goods) as a whole is certainly still shrinking, and probably will continue to shrink well into next year. I can’t see how anyone could read the data otherwise.

June was the first month that Best Buy cut way back on the number of new Anime releases its stores are carrying, but the numbers don't overlap well. Perhaps service at other online retailers is dropping as they cut staff and shrink inventories. That's always difficult to quantify. In any case, I'm hoping the IT upgrades go smoothly and that we won't be up the entire night. :-)