I’ve noticed that a lot of your customer base has been alienated by the recent Free Day event. Long time customers and enthusiasts alike waited 2 hours for the last step of their checkout only to be beaten out by Joe Blow newcomer directed from Hack-A-Day by the lure of free stuff.
Now I’m not saying what you guys did wasn’t great. I mean really you probably brought over a lot of people to hobby electronics with this. But perhaps as you could offer up a consolation prize to all the rest.
How about giving everyone who registered BEFORE free day began a coupon where if they order $200 worth of product they can have another $100 free. Or order $100 and get $50.
greensasquatch:
I’ve noticed that a lot of your customer base has been alienated by the recent Free Day event. Long time customers and enthusiasts alike waited 2 hours for the last step of their checkout only to be beaten out by Joe Blow newcomer directed from Hack-A-Day by the lure of free stuff.
Now I’m not saying what you guys did wasn’t great. I mean really you probably brought over a lot of people to hobby electronics with this. But perhaps as you could offer up a consolation prize to all the rest.
How about giving everyone who registered BEFORE free day began a coupon where if they order $200 worth of product they can have another $100 free. Or order $100 and get $50.
This free day debacle reminds one of the Blizzcon 2008 ticket sales through the Blizzard online store. Absolute. Disaster. As regards SFE, I had an order all prepared and ready at the confirm page, when it reloaded with the free day option, 2+ hours of submitting and resubmitting turned out to be fruitless. This is the one–THE ONE–place in the entirety of web commerce you cannot drop the ball: when a customer issues a “submit”, it submits. It should never, ever, never EVER timeout. You lose customers that way.
In Blizzard’s case, they had to divert compute cycles from about a few hundred blades (e.g., game servers) into the store just to make it run for up to six minutes at a time.
I am not juvenile enough to demand my “free stuff,” but I am going to expect a glitch-free online experience while trying to order something. It does not matter if one or one-hundred thousand http requests are inbound; the service should not be noticably different to the client. If this cannot be handled (and it obviously wasn’t), don’t do high-profile events again until it can actually be supported with a reasonable expectation of success.
Lastly, I hope one of your customers is not a sufficiently POed lawyer, otherwise then the term “class-action” could be quick to reach many ears.
Don’t you think that’s a wee bit presumptuous? “Hey, you ran this great promotion and gave away loads of stuff and I couldn’t get in on it so why don’t you give away more stuff?”
I mean, I can understand being frustrated after Free Day - I think it’s good and right to talk about how the process was frustrating (it sure as hell was for me) - just, really, don’t act like Sparkfun owes you anything just 'cause you weren’t one of the lucky winners…
They will make money hand over fist from this promotion. They can also do a bit to bring back any alienated customers by extending a bit of a deal. I don’t say give away more free stuff, how will that help their business. What I suggest is encourage more spending with rewards.
A happy long term customer will make you more money in the end.
To the sparkfun employees already posting on various forums about “sour grapes” etc. Bad form.
Yes you can look at us as the lousy people who complain that when you try to do something nice. OR you can look at us as the customers who were just dissapointed that for all their efforts they got shut out. And look for ways to get us to return to being customers.
That still doesn’t help that I wasted two good hours sitting here trying to get to the credit card screen. AND, when I FINALLY did, the offer had just ended - probably no more than 30 seconds before I got to that payment page…
I also find it quite strange that the site was running smooth as silk only about 5 minutes after the promotion was over - I can’t imagine the clicks stopped right after the promotion did…
Anyhow - not a good start to my day.
I’ve only used sparkfun once in the past - and it was a good experience. But this whole thing has left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the site - It’ll take me a while to “forgive” the site - in the meantime I’ll be shopping elsewhere.
The way i see it is, if you had your order in the shopping cart prior to the end of the promotion, that was an order claimed, and should have been calculated that way. Allow those orders to proceed as the traffic allows.
Not just when the server allowed those through the congestion to check out.
greensasquatch:
To the sparkfun employees already posting on various forums about “sour grapes” etc. Bad form.
Meh, I can totally sympathize with that sentiment, though. I mean, the whole thing is a game. It’s not entirely fair, though, and that’s just life. All this backlash is basically people who played the game, should have known what they were getting into, found the experience frustrating, and lost, and can’t deal with it. Sounds like “sour grapes” to me!
twistlok:
The way i see it is, if you had your order in the shopping cart prior to the end of the promotion, that was an order claimed, and should have been calculated that way. Allow those orders to proceed as the traffic allows.
Not just when the server allowed those through the congestion to check out.
Good promotion, bad planning.
Well written. I agree (but probably only because that’s exactly what happened to me).
twistlok:
The way i see it is, if you had your order in the shopping cart prior to the end of the promotion
Huh? You mean there were people who didn’t have their orders in the shopping carts prior to the beginning of the promotion? Seems kind of brain-dead to me… I mean, are you gonna muddle through about twenty page loads (looking up items and adding them to the cart) while the server is thrashing, or just five or so (the checkout procedure)?
twistlok:
The way i see it is, if you had your order in the shopping cart prior to the end of the promotion
Huh? You mean there were people who didn’t have their orders in the shopping carts prior to the beginning of the promotion? Seems kind of brain-dead to me… I mean, are you gonna muddle through about twenty page loads (looking up items and adding them to the cart) while the server is thrashing, or just five or so (the checkout procedure)?
Same difference, is it not?
Before the end of the promotion, they were orders placed and should have taken priority over orders that were “not” yet in the carts.