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Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow and all the StackExchange family of sites are down. I suspect the lost productivity from that will be more costly over the whole economy than potential lost sales via Shopify. People can go back to shopify so those transactions not definitely blocked for ever, any time "lost" due to reference resources being unavailable can't so easily be claimed back.

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I don't think you understand how ecommerce works.

A very significant amount of people won't go back. It's why the most effective marketing campaign by far is retargeting those people to convince them to come back. Unfortunately that's not possible in this case since you can't track the users as the site is unusable.

> A very significant amount of people won't go back

So they didn't need what they were about to purchase and saved their money. Doesn't sound like a net loss to me.

> I don't think you understand how ecommerce works ... people won't go back

I was talking about the economy in general, not specific e-commerce sites. People that actually need what they were looking for but don't go back will buy it elsewhere. The money still flows, just somewhere else. And if they don't need the item(s), they'll perhaps use the money for something more useful.

Some sites are on Cloudflare, right? Looks like we have a natural experiment to test this belief!

Makes me wonder how the engineers will fix this if they can’t visit Stack Overflow :)

Believe it or not, but there are developers out there that read the docs.

[citation needed]

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