A more appropriate way of handling todays fiasco would have been to clear ALL carts at start up, you must fill your cart AFTER start up, shop during the time and $$ allotted and hope to make it out with some goodies. This would have made it a lot more fair, it would have lasted longer and the servers would have coped better by not having to respond to thousands of the same request at the same time, the load would be a bit more mixed.
The fact that thousands were sitting there with full cart with their finger on the submit button is what made this a total disaster.
So all you barking about not getting anything, ITS YOUR OWN FAULT, YOU halted the server by being greedy.
OH, I just love the people who think they were the only ones with a cart ready and full and should have gotten it for that reason. EVERYBODY HAD THEIR CART READY AND FULL!!! THAT WAS THE WHOLE PROBLEM!!!
I disagree. Whether you are filling you cart or going through the checkout process you’re still using their servers so I would think they would get the same amount of traffic.
I disagree too. A checkout click if far less server demanding than people looking around causing the server to serve the new pages up with images / graphics and what not.
A better way would have been to require a $200 minimum purchase with the first $100 being free (up to the $100K limit). This would have discouraged the treasure seekers who’s only goal was to get free stuff to sell on eBay.
SodaAnt:
A better way would have been to require a $200 minimum purchase with the first $100 being free (up to the $100K limit). This would have discouraged the treasure seekers who’s only goal was to get free stuff to sell on eBay.
good idea, and it would have been more of a “give back” to the customers that got them here in the first place.
I have an alternate recommendation - i don’t mean to hijack your thread but there are enough about freeday and this seemed a good place for some constructive comments.
Firstly: I did not participate in free day, though I did attempt to visit the site to see status though I saw little more than a ddos’d attack.
I believe a way SparkFun could have made the most would have been to only offer discounts only to *.edu addresses. I also do not have a *.edu address anymore (even though this forum account is linked to my old school address, i can’t access).
These are somewhat more exclusive and would discourage people making 20 email accounts and submitting orders for reselling on ebay or whatever (as one hackaday commenter said he did…). It would probably also provide the most benefit as students tend to be in more need of freebies for more noble uses (ie: senior design projects, independent research, hands on experience) which was one of the goals in the first place I believe.
As far as the real reason behind such an event, advertising ($ - nothing wrong with it), you would still reach a huge audience and many new customers. I don’t thing a major company would base their decision to do business with you on whether or not you gave them $100 off an order or not but students certainly might.
Sure it excludes some people, but so does massive traffic from lots of people trolling the web for freebies. Couple this with other ideas, like a 75% off of your order ($100 discount max) and i think you would have a further reduction in resellers (people using this to order ONLY 120+ green leds COUGH which they can get from digikey for a lot less than $100 COUGHCOUGH*).
I don’t agree that clearing carts is a good idea. I had a cart of items i intend to buy and had no intention of Free Day’ing it and would be annoyed if it got cleared. I also don’t think you should limit to previous customers (bad business decision IMHO) or active members.
All that being said, your advertising manager/dept/whoever had a great idea with this and i think it was a really awesome promotion. Of course people are annoyed they didn’t get their freebies they had been daydreaming of for 2 months but thats life.
Not sure if you noticed, but the biggest gripe from FreeDay seems to be that people felt their time was wasted. If SFE had done what you had suggested it would have stretched out the day a bit longer (since it would have taken about 30 minutes to add each item to your cart), but it means a lot more people would have wasted A LOT more time.
Imagine how you’d feel if a 6-item online shopping session took 3 hours, and then when you’re finally able to check out, you find the discount/special deal/whatever is over? You think people are upset now?
I ran a simulation of what would happen if your “suggestion” were implemented. This is what I came up with:
Not all students attend educational institutions. There are plenty of people out there who are in the process of learning something without any assistance from an edu. Just because someone isn’t paying an edu to teach them things doesn’t mean they aren’t a student. It also doesn’t make their desire to learn less valid.
We’ve been getting a lot of feedback on ways Free Day could have been more equitable or favored existing customers better. Suffice it to say that the next large-scale promotion we do will be very different (if not for the negative feedback from Free Day just for the sake of trying something new).
I will say that emptying carts was briefly considered but never really on the table. Without a wish list feature in place (our most requested feature which I plan on implementing in 2010) customers must use their one shopping cart to store items they want to purchase. Emptying the carts of thousands of customers, some of whom are distributors, regardless of whether they chose to participate in Free Day would have made many, many more people angry.
But hey, if anything Free Day has inspired tons of people to describe how they would do things differently, be they satisfied or not. The adage that “no publicity is bad publicity” has a corollary: “no ideas are bad ideas”. Ideas can be impractical or unfeasible but I still love to hear all of the many we’re getting now, even the ones from irate individuals. =)
