Overstock Auctions said its servers were straining due to the 20 percent increase in traffic it experienced this weekend compared to the previous weekend. The company extended some auctions, and credited seller listing fees for others.
Overstock's announcement stated that its new blended Auctions and Shopping search design it had released last week resulted in more shoppers from Overstock.com to the auction platform than ever before, and many users experienced "O No" pages on Monday.
This is the second time Overstock has reported performance issues this month. The company reported issues on November 11, and on the 17th Overstock said it had added new servers that were handling the increased volume of visitors and listings the site had been experiencing (http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m11/i18/s02).
In yesterday's announcement, Overstock said those recent site improvements helped, but more changes were needed. "In order to combat these challenges, the development team moved the search and browse features to new more powerful servers that are designed to handle higher loads. We have also improved the underlying code that serves up department homepages, improving both performance and relevancy of the items displayed. The work that the engineering team did yesterday (as well as over the last few weeks) has made a vast improvement - in fact, the site is now responding faster and serving fewer O No pages than it has in months!"
To compensate sellers for Monday's difficulties faced by sellers due to the site issues, Overstock extended all auctions open on November 28th at 7pm MST 24 hours beyond their original end time, and for every auction that closed without a sale between 7am and 7pm MST on November 28th, it credited back to the seller listing fees as general credits.
http://digbig.com/4fmgm
