Apple Store Down. Verizon iPhone Coming • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Store Down. Verizon iPhone Coming

#11

Post by ugh » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 9:34 AM UTC

modeless wrote: post #2

Why does Apple always take their entire online store down whenever they do product updates? It must cost them hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in lost sales every time.

Does it? Buying something in Apple’s online store is not like buying your favorite cereal in the supermarket. You are not going to not buy that $500 iPad or that $1700 MacBook Pro because the store was down for a few hours. I don’t think you can look at the average hourly revenue of the online store, look at how long it was down and calculate Apple’s revenue loss from that.

Only the super-rich can afford to go impulse buying in Apple’s online store (or any store selling expensive stuff).

Re: Apple Store Down. Verizon iPhone Coming

#12

Post by diziet » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 9:52 AM UTC

I'd already preordered it for my mom on the Verizon website. It took about an hour for the CC info to be accepted, they must be getting a lot of the orders.

Re: Apple Store Down. Verizon iPhone Coming

#13

Post by modeless » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 5:55 PM UTC

ugh wrote: post #11

modeless wrote: post #2

Why does Apple always take their entire online store down whenever they do product updates? It must cost them hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in lost sales every time.

Does it? Buying something in Apple’s online store is not like buying your favorite cereal in the supermarket. You are not going to not buy that $500 iPad or that $1700 MacBook Pro because the store was down for a few hours. I don’t think you can look at the average hourly revenue of the online store, look at how long it was down and calculate Apple’s revenue loss from that. Only the super-rich can afford to go impuls…

I don’t think you can look at the average hourly revenue of the online store, look at how long it was down and calculate Apple’s revenue loss from that.

Of course not. But neither can you say that 100% of people will come back after the store turns them away. There is undoubtedly a cost to store downtime; the only question is how much. On a high traffic store like Apple's, even a small percentage of lost customers is a large amount of money lost.