Yahoo! Stiffs Its Small Business Customers On Cyber Monday

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Yahoo Merchants Solutions had an off day two days ago on Cyber Monday. They lost revenue, many of their customers lost revenue, and they likely will lose many of their customers. The comments and feedback on Yahoo!s blog were not friendly pats on the back. One customer had this to say:

“Just telling us the time line of what happened isn’t very useful. We already know that as we watched it happen and suffered the lost business because of it.

If you want to gain back the confidence of your customer base you ought to be more specific about what happened, why it happened, and what you are doing to assure us that it won’t happen again. ”

That’s just plain old-fashioned bad business. If Yahoo! expects to keep its small business customers and not lose them to Google’s Checkout services then they’ll have to work hard not to let this happen again. One more such instances on a heavy shopping day like that and you’ll see small business merchants flying to anywhere else. The sad thing is this: The customers who likely lost the most business were the customers who did the best job in their SEO and SEM promotions. Their reward? Nada.