Am i asking to much for SFE to have some common sense when hosting a free day like this ?
SFE, should have set the system up so that first come first serve, and bandwidth throttled it to them and or when someone is finally able to reach the checkout process, THEY GET PRIORITY, not the knuckle heads that come to the game late :evil: .
So, my question is how in the hell was all these other people able to place orders when i was on the system and in the middle of an order and could not get through .
I was prudent and started early, and yet somehow all these late comers got ahead of me.
Seriously, i logged in the night before and found all the parts i wanted. added them to my cart so all i would have to do is click checkout and beat the mad rush and the server clog. So now about an hour before all hell was going to break loose, they close the site for some update, WTF!
after 7 million attempts to get back in to the main site, i was able to add parts to my cart slowly and i do mean slowly as the server connection kept timing out and i had to hit resent like 40 million times. Seriously i was doing this constantly about every 4-5 minutes for and hour !!!
Then i finally got to the checkout, entered in my C.C. information and then was taken to the last page of the checkout after (another 30-40 re-sends) To which i had to click another button for them to check if it was ok for me to get the discount. I did just that, then it kept timing out for another 45 minutes and then i finally got the dreaded message saying it was over.
I agree they could have probably handled it a little better – I didn’t get anything either, and I’m a little frustrated – but it was a nice gesture. It got them an ENORMOUS amount of free publicity, which in the long run is better for customers because higher sales volume brings costs (and prices) down and expands and increases inventory.
I’m sure they’ve taken some lessons from this, and I applaud them for trying this experiment in electronic commerce.
I find it quite ironic that when I was finally able to get to the page to enter my CC info, the offer was over. The previous page less than a minute earlier reported $12k left to be had.
I was really looking forward to the “project” I had created in my cart.
I got the same thing. Had the check out page up 5 minutes after it started and got to the billing page right after it hit $100,000. Oh well, I’ll order the parts anyway.
i like you filled my cart before it all began and then the site went down
and all my work went to hell with it.
man I am soooo disappointed I will never do this again.
one thing I need to know those people that got through they have a
superspeed connection to the internet like 500gigs per second?
deffinately disappointed
ducklite.
It’s more like a mob rush - regardless of your connect speed - if you manage to mash your way in just after another dropped request. Its more an issue of the timing of connection clicks than it is a bandwidth issue.
seulater:
Am i asking to much for SFE to have some common sense when hosting a free day like this ?
SFE, should have set the system up so that first come first serve, and bandwidth throttled it to them and or when someone is finally able to reach the checkout process, THEY GET PRIORITY, not the knuckle heads that come to the game late :evil: .
So, my question is how in the hell was all these other people able to place orders when i was on the system and in the middle of an order and could not get through .
Them’s the breaks, man. I didn’t get any, either. Almost did - got as far as hitting the “click here to try for the discount” button, but the page timed out and I tried reloading it a bunch of times, but eventually I screwed up and my attempt was effectively over… It’s a drag, 'cause I’d kind of gotten my hopes up - I console myself with the thought that maybe the people who did get in on the deal needed the free stuff more than I did.
As for the cart: were you logged in? If you’re logged in, your cart is saved to your user account. If you’re not, then it’s (I guess) a temporary session thing, prone to loss. Even yeaterday the site was running slow enough that it would have been a major task to re-fill a shopping cart - so I did some experimentation and found that all I had to do was log in and my cart would reappear, even on another browser or machine. But this morning the site was slow enough that I found it more productive to get back to a machine where I was still logged in, rather than try to log in…
Remember Sparkfun was also using Free Day to give their new servers a sound beating… So throttling everything with a queueing system would have been a bit counterproductive - and the server would’ve been thrashed with requests either way…
noctolater:
the ‘free’ publicity cost them $100,000, remember
I doubt that, maybe 30-40k, if that. You forget the profit margin, probably 50% at least. I have no real data to back this up of course. BUT 30-40k in advertising would have been MUCH less effective so well worth it to them.
blueblueblue:
And I still needed to order the stuff I waited until today to purchase!
I think that was the real driving force behind Free Day - get folks to hold off ordering stuff until the servers were updated. Or maybe just until 2009 was over 'cuz they looked at the balance sheets and didn’t want any more profits (and therefore taxes) for the year…
