News Room






July 14, 2005
Wal-Mart Gets Potter Book Date Wrong, Shuts Web Site
By Lauren Coleman-Lochner and Greg Wiles

July 14 (Bloomberg) -- Two glitches in Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s vast operations came to light today as the retailer, the world's largest, geared up to sell J.K. Rowling's new Harry Potter book.

A message on the company's customer service line said a July 12 e-mail to some customers who had preordered "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" incorrectly put the release date as July 20 rather than July 16. The message came to prominence when the Walmart.com Web site, closed for as much as 10 hours this morning, directed customers to the telephone line.

The site shutdown was not related to the e-mail or the book's release, company spokeswoman Sharon Weber said. Walmart.com is closed once a week to update it, she said.

"We made a business decision to keep our site down for a few additional hours," said Amy Colella, another spokeswoman for the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company.

Colella also said the misleading e-mail was sent July 11, not July 12, as the company's recording stated.

Alertsite.com, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based firm that tracks Web site performance, said Walmart.com posted a message saying it was closed at about 12:40 a.m. New York time.

The same message appeared for at least the next two hours and 20 minutes and may have remained through about 10:30 a.m., said Ken Godskind, Alertsite.com vice president. The site was up and running by 11 a.m.

Unusual Time

The mid-morning outage "was an unusual time for them to be performing site maintenance. A lot of sites can get away with it, but Wal-Mart is an iconic retailer."

The site usually is offline for maintenance about one or two times a week for periods of 30 minutes to two hours, he said.

Walmart.com's traffic rose by 37 percent to 22.6 million in June, making it the third-most-visited retail site, behind EBay Inc. and Amazon.com, according to ComScore Networks Inc., a Reston, Virginia-based Internet research firm.

Walmart.com's 2004 sales were $782.2 million, according to Kurt Peters, editor of Chicago-based Internet Retailer magazine. Wal-Mart had sales of $285.2 billion in the fiscal year ended in January.

Shares of Wal-Mart rose 37 cents to $50.51 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They have fallen 4.4 percent this year.