2007 is a turning point for “Cyber Monday” — the year this invented concept turned from obscure marketing gimmick to industry rallying cry. The best part is that customers seem to be playing along.

Every rose has its thorn, though… and this year, perhaps the most dramatic prick happened to Yahoo Stores. Yahoo Stores suffered persistent, widespread failures and site slowdowns on Monday. When you’ve got 40,000 paying customers, that’s a massive problem. The Wall Street Journal reports that the outage started around 5:30am EST and continued through at least the afternoon, although Yahoo declined to explain the full extent of the problems.

What’s the impact? Well, CyberMonday is probably worth at least 4x the revenue of an average day — at least 1% of annual sales. If the average Yahoo Stores merchant does only $100,000 in revenue, then we’re talking about $43 million of revenue at risk on this one day. A six hour outage during prime shopping hours could easily amount to $20 million of lost sales for Yahoo Stores merchants. Ouch!

Filed under: Yahoo Stores, cyber monday, online retail, outage, shopping carts, strategy