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Downtime Ugliness At Beauty Site Sephora.com
On the brick-and-mortar front, Sephora is no lightweight, operating about 515 stores in 14 countries. The company, founded in 1969 and established in the U.S. as “Sephora America” in 1998, is a “specialty retailing” subsidiary of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the $24 billion European luxury goods conglomerate. .
In 2006, it became the exclusive beauty product retailer in J.C. Penny stores with a “store within a store” concept and a link between J.C. Penny’s Web site and Sephora.com.
When one takes a look at the Sephora.com uptime and performance record, it’s hard to not see the irony in Sephora’s acknowledgement of the site’s importance: The company points out that Sephora.com ranks as its “largest North American store in terms of sales and selection of products and brands.”
The causes of the outages seem to vary. This week’s issues appeared to be “mostly network related or some other type of connection problem,” that prevented any pinging of the site, Alguacil said. “The reason I think it might be network related is because our servers simply couldn’t connect to their server at all during the recent downtime periods,” he said. “In other words, we didn’t get far enough to get a proper response from their Web server. They could have had a problem on their LAN or their ISP could have had issues. The cause of those problems can be many things, such as damaged cabling and problems with equipment like switches and routers.”
The May downtime appeared to be a “different story,” Alguacil said. The site showed signs of life, but that was limited to the issuing of a cute apology.
The site reported back an internal server error (HTTP error 500) and presented on a status page: “Sorry, gorgeous! Our site is currently having a bad hair day (read: experiencing technical difficulties) due to high traffic volumes. We’ll be back in action—and perfectly polished—ASAP, so check back with us in a few minutes to continue shopping.”
Even when Sephora.com was up and running it often wasn’t performing well. “The site also suffered from a lot of slowdown” during tests that measured response time for HTML code, Alguacil said. He said Pingdom classifies a site as being down if it is completely unreachable, does not load the basic HTML within 30 seconds or responds with an HTTP error code. Alguacil noted the Pingdom system “always performs a double-check before it reports anything as down,” performing an extra test from a different location for confirmation.
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
