I’d just like to shout out that I think free day has been a success.
I didn’t get through and get the free stuff. That is alright. At 9am I went ahead and tried to add an item or two to my cart but was unsuccessful. Oh well, I went off to work and life went on.
Sparkfun did something really cool today guys. Not many companies have done something like this before and it was experimental, however it was in the best of spirit and has done nothing but improve my image of them in my mind.
I don’t feel stabbed in the back because Joe-new_user got his $100 of stuff and I didn’t. I’ve ordered on and off through Sparkfun for the past 2 years and have either directly purchased or been involved in the purchase of a good $10k of product.
Yes, the site was slow and bogged down. This is alright. If any of you have been involved in large scale PHP/mySQL projects you’ll realize how difficult it is to build a scalable system. Crashes and bugs are facts of life for programmers. No system is perfect and if you’ll remember one of the points of this exercise was to test out their new cluster. The cluster partially failed the test and I’m sure the IT guys will be busy looking over the data and making improvements.
If any of you believe Sparkfun knew this would happen before it did I would be willing to bet you are mistaken. As they say, the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men go often astray.
I guess the bottom line in my mind is even though the site was slow you still had an equal chance with everyone else in line to get your $100 of kit. You don’t get pissed off when a lotto ticket doesn’t net you millions and you should just chill out when a free promotional give-away put on by one of the most hobbyist friendly, open-source companies out there doesn’t net you $100 of free parts.
I will probably order my cart full of parts anyway, and I will continue to order from SF when possible.
ab500:
If any of you believe Sparkfun knew this would happen before it did I would be willing to bet you are mistaken.
Huh? Really?
I mean, when they first announced Free Day, there was no doubt in my mind that this is what would happen. When you offer $100 of free stuff, first come, first serve, on the internet, people do tend to show up for that. It was clear to me that this was going to put the site under extraordinary load - which, as you say, was one of their stated goals…
I agree with most of what you had to say, but it seems crazy to me that anybody would think the website would not be quite nearly unreachable for the entire promotion period.
ab500:
I will probably order my cart full of parts anyway, and I will continue to order from SF when possible.
I can almost guarantee you that they knew this would happen with a good percentage of the people that put together a cart but weren’t lucky enough to get in on the promo…
What better way to force someone to make what is essentially a $100 wish list - and now only a click or two away from actually ordering…
I dumped most of my cart for that reason. Maybe someday I’ll get the stomach to return here and only buy the $25 or so of product that I actually sorta want/need.
Who wants to bet that the majority of the “winners” in this fiasco were just here for the freebies and had never heard of Spark Fun before today?
I’ll also bet that most of the “free” stuff scored today will end up on eBay the moment the UPS guy delivers it.
What really frosts my hide is the comments from Spark Fun saying they “just wanted to give something back”. Give something back to whom? The raging masses who have no interest in electronics and were just looking for something to dump on eBay, or the repeat customers who have made SF what it is? The latter group was ill-served by today’s event…
SodaAnt:
Who wants to bet that the majority of the “winners” in this fiasco were just here for the freebies and had never heard of Spark Fun before today?
I’ll also bet that most of the “free” stuff scored today will end up on eBay the moment the UPS guy delivers it.
What really frosts my hide is the comments from Spark Fun saying they “just wanted to give something back”. Give something back to whom? The raging masses who have no interest in electronics and were just looking for something to dump on eBay, or the repeat customers who have made SF what it is? The latter group was ill-served by today’s event…
I totally agree with this. This was simply a free day, not giving back to the customers.
Just my story, but I have bought from sparkfun before, I found out about free day because I follow the site and regularly watch their new products list and news posts - not because I saw news of it somewhere else first. It is true I’m far on the ‘hobby’ side and haven’t spent anywhere near $10k though.
I was very lucky and got $100 worth of stuff. So while not everyone was a previous patron, not everyone wasn’t either. (And I can tell you every piece I ordered will be used by me and not resold, I am very excited about it, I spent hours tweaking my shopping cart this week). I also wasn’t expecting to win nor did I feel entitled to win. In fact watching the buzz I figured I had very little chance, but why not try?
As much as ‘giving back’ was part of this event, no one can deny that promotion was too. This was a great way to make more people aware of the site who were not, which is great for sparkfun and thus great for any patron of sparkfun. This wouldn’t have been the case if it were purely open to previous customers.
It was obvious from the day of the announcement that the site would melt from the load, and if by some miracle it didn’t the event would be over in minutes if not seconds.
In the end I hope sparkfun had enough of a positive experience (and even an increase in overall sales) from this to give it another try some day, maybe in a different format or with different rules. Maybe not in a way designed to kill their servers. Such as allowing wish lists to be submitted during some window and then winners chosen randomly and notified, or choosing winners at the end of the day from all purchases made, or many other ideas. It is fun to think about.
Anyway, I enjoyed the promotion and will enjoy my prizes when they arrive. Thanks sparkfun!
Such as allowing wish lists to be submitted during some window and then winners chosen randomly and notified, or choosing winners at the end of the day from all purchases made, or many other ideas. It is fun to think about.