Has anyone successfully checked out with $100 off?
Nope! Tried 4 times. Actually tried completing my order. Now I have a $113 dollar order to pay for.
Hope I can cancel my order. I was going to buy all the stuff, just over a few weeks as I could afford it. It would be nice to have had some notice if it was working or not.
Nope. Could it be that it isn’t “Free Day” until [January 7th, 2010? 
](Free Day is January 7th, 2010! - News - SparkFun Electronics)
FartingMonkey92:
Nope. Could it be that it isn’t “Free Day” until [January 7th, 2010?I must be the biggest noob ever. I must apologize, I hope they will let me cancel my order due to stupidity.
Why is the site so busy! Am I not the only muppet in the group?](Free Day is January 7th, 2010! - News - SparkFun Electronics)
I’d be interested to find out who had announced that today was “Free Day”…
Haha! Funny. I found the site to be unusually slow this morning when I was checking for a reference to a PIR sensor and double checked to make sure it was actually Jan and not Dec.
Something tells me that the actual Jan 7th date is not going to go over well. I picked out about $40 worth of GPS stuff I’d like to order, but something tells me I might not even get into the site.
Sadly these kind of giveaways make people who get in on them happy and the rest, raving mad. I’m not certain it’s the best way to ‘give back’.
TheDirty:
Haha! Funny. I found the site to be unusually slow this morning when I was checking for a reference to a PIR sensor and double checked to make sure it was actually Jan and not Dec.Something tells me that the actual Jan 7th date is not going to go over well. I picked out about $40 worth of GPS stuff I’d like to order, but something tells me I might not even get into the site.
Sadly these kind of giveaways make people who get in on them happy and the rest, raving mad. I’m not certain it’s the best way to ‘give back’.
I have a feeling nobody else wants to admit they had the wrong day.
These kinda things always piss someone off. Just be happy they are trying something this cool.
I found this site a week ago. I have a few projects I am working on and Sparkfun sure beats RadioShack when I need something. Plus all the cool stuff!
They did cancel my order. One more reason I like these guys!
If that makes you feel better :lol:Pendarus:
I have a feeling nobody else wants to admit they had the wrong day.
Pendarus:
These kinda things always piss someone off.
If someone gets pissed off because they didn’t get something FREE they deserve to be punched in the balls!
SpinDrah:
Pendarus:
If someone gets pissed off because they didn’t get something FREE they deserve to be punched in the balls!
It’s nice enough to say that, but as a company you have to consider such things. For those people that get their hopes up and aren’t able to get into the site to order anything due to the site being overloaded or the $100k goes very quickly, it ends up just being a negative experience. Which is exactly the opposite of the intent. Unless they are changing something before January 7th, the Sparkfun site isn’t the most reliable now, it’s going to get massacred then.
I personally don’t care that much, which is why I said I picked out about $40 worth of stuff I want to order. Other people need this more than I do. If I can get on great, if I can’t, no worries. I think Sparkfun would have been better off giving money to non profit electronics clubs or organizations rather than having this free for all, though.
TheDirty:
…Other people need this more than I do. If I can get on great, if I can’t, no worries. I think Sparkfun would have been better off giving money to non profit electronics clubs or organizations rather than having this free for all, though.
When my son heard about “Free Day”, he was beside himself with joy. He has been saving up his allowance (and hoping for some extra $$$ at Christmas) to buy some parts he wants for a project. When I mentioned that there will be a lot of people competing for that $100 of merchandise (and he wasn’t staying home from school to place his order), the reality of the situation sunk in. I commend SparkFun for wanting to give back and for their innovative approach. Kudos. A potential one thousand or more customers will be very happy, while others will be frustrated. That can’t be helped. It will be an interesting experiment, and I hope that even if it doesn’t go as smoothly as SparkFun would like, they will give it another go in the future.
I do have a suggestion to mitigate the potential chaos. If the model is not like Visa’s “your next purchase could be free”, why not take the names and addresses of the existing customer base, and select 1000 of them to award a $100 credit that must be applied sometime in January 2010? That would eliminate the surge of website activity on the 7th and stagger things out for the order fulfillment people? Or slot x number of credits for existing customers and y number of credits for non-profits, students, schools, and the like.
I think SFE is performing some type of psychological experiment on the nerd race. Either way, its a nice thing that they are doing and I doubt the negative consequences will outweigh the good. A $100 credit goes a long way for engineering grad students such as myself that live below the poverty line. One can only get so many free samples.