Amazon.com tweaks sale after complaints

SEATTLE — Following a flood of traffic that briefly choked its Web site and sparked complaints from customers, Amazon.com has tweaked a holiday promotion to discourage frenzied shoppers from rushing for the front of the virtual sales line.

Instead of jostling for one of four discounted items the moment they go on sale, shoppers will now have to count on randomly receiving a voucher that entitles them to buy a product they chose in an online poll.

The company and an independent analyst said the change should be a fair way of handling traffic for the promotion, which bogged down Amazon’s site during Thanksgiving and generated bitter complaints from shoppers.

“We certainly experiment with things, and when we get feedback from customers and are able to make an experience that we think is better, we certainly try to do that,” Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said Tuesday.

•Yahoo Inc.’s new advertising platform is a “comprehensive program” that will fix the company’s search-based ad problems and bolster sales, the company’s chief sales officer said Tuesday.

Panama, as the platform is known, “was built to accommodate all ads and prices across all platforms,” said Wenda Harris Millard at UBS’ 34th Annual Global Media & Communications Conference.

But Wall Street has been frustrated with Yahoo for most of this year, largely because the company has lagged Google Inc., the Internet search leader that runs the Web’s largest marketing network, in its ability to get Web users to click on search-based advertisements.

The Panama system is supposed to close that gap.

“Wall Street wants (revenue per search) fixed, they are obsessed with it,” Millard said.

Search-based ads are typically text links that appear with the results of a search, while branded advertisements are the colorful ads, often with video, that appear on content sites such as a newspaper’s main page.

•Wal-Mart has settled a nearly $5.1 million class-action lawsuit brought by the estates of 73 former employees in Oklahoma.

A federal judge in Tulsa gave final approval Monday to the settlement, which calls for about a third of the money to go to the plaintiffs’ attorneys and for each of the plaintiffs to receive about $35,000 to $50,000.

The plaintiffs had sued to recover life insurance benefits they said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. wrongfully received upon the employees’ deaths.

“It was a fair result for these Oklahoma families,” said Michael D. Myers of Houston, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers.