If you've ever been in the retail business, you know the busiest shopping days of the year are between the end of November and the first of January.

You also know that the very survival of some retailers will depend on how many sales and orders they make between now and the end of the year.

For that reason, retailers do everything they can to get customers into their stores, and buying their merchandise.

The same thing goes for web retailers.

Many depend on big sales this time of year, and they often create special offers to entice customers to spend money.

And all this is good. Unless . . .

The store owner makes changes which make it impossible for customers to do business with the store.

Here's an example.

I received an email from a online store I have ordered from before, and they were offering a DVD training course for half of their normal price.

I wanted the DVDs, so I clicked the 'buy it now' link in the email and that took me to the retailers brand new, just installed, shopping cart, with fancy flash graphics and all kinds of bells and whistles.

But there was a big problem - the shopping cart didn't work.

In their rush to get a new shopping cart system installed, the site owner forgot to test the shopping cart to see if orders could actually be placed.

If they had tested it, they would have discovered the shopping cart didn't display any of the products shown in their email offer.

Obviously this will be very bad for business. A lot of angry customers who couldn't get the deal they wanted.

The moral of this is - the busiest shopping months of the year are not the time to be replacing your shopping systems. Save that upgrade for the slowest months of the year.