Multiple ProStores outages affect merchants
According to ProStores’ message board, an unplanned, system-wide outage took place on Tuesday, May 28. The cause was said to be a third party vendor of data services. The issue lasted for hours and affected all merchants and tech support lines.
At 3:00PM Tuesday, ProStores reported, “We’ve identified and resolved the problem and are taking steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen in the future.” But within 30 minutes, a second outage occured; and was “related to the first.” The second outage took nearly five hours to resolve.
As a courtesy, successful transaction fees will be refunded to ProStores merchants for the month of May. This exposes one shortcoming of multi-tenant software. A service glitch at the data or application layer can affect everyone all at once.
Webinar on Ecommerce Platform Selection
Research indicates that nearly two-thirds of retailers are considering an ecommerce platform replacement within the next 2 years. Bill Mirabito of B2C Partners will present material on How to Select an Ecommerce Platform on Thursday, May 29 at 3:00PM.
No one size fits all. The material is vendor agnostic. During this session, Bill will describe the four different software models. He will also share tools and methods for identifying best fit, along with step-by-step techniques for cultivating consensus among key stakeholders.
Retailers who are now considering a platform replacement will leave this session with valuable material they can put into action immediately.
MarketLive scores new investors, $20M in capital
On the heels of recent news that MarketLive will end support for version 4 and prior, the company announced today it has closed a new round of financing and added two new investors. According to the press release, “JAFCO Ventures and Northgate Capital, join existing investors, Sequoia Capital, Sigma Partners, Globespan Capital, and others, who all fully participated in the round,” which amounts to $20M in new capital.
Rumors had been swirling around that MarketLive had been putting out feelers for a sale. Today’s news sharply curbs that speculation.
Speaking briefly with Gartner last week, Gene Alvarez told me MarketLive’s decision to jettison the older versions is “customary for software companies” and essential to the company’s future. While this may be true, it’s no consolation to nearly half of their clients – many who launched on v.4 in the last 18 months after an arduous, expensive integration. Now they must start all over.
Perhaps MarketLive will follow the lead of other SaaS vendors, and invest capital to reduce the cost and complexity of upgrades. In April, MarketLive CEO Terry Austin said that improving upgrades was indeed part of the plan. While admitting that migration is expensive, he asserts it is still more affordable than transitioning to a competitor.