eBuyer £1 sale fail: Customers vent fury... on Facebook

eBuyer is facing a mini customer revolt on Facebook over the collapse of its website during the £1 sale on Cyber Monday. The etailer says that an unprecedented numbers of visitors caused the portal to crash leaving many "frustrated", but people took to the social media site to voice their disgust. Customer Mark Herridge …

[Tom 15]

Bah

I do feel sorry for eBuyer... what a cock-up!

The notion of it being like "gluing the doors shut" though is a bit dumb... more like the shop being full?

[Nixon]

"Jorrell Knight pointed out that if eBuyer had been "an actual store not online, its [sic] the equivalent of someone glueing the doors shut! Please consider trying another sales when ur servers can handle the traffic.""

Jorrell Knight, you are an idiot! XD

It's the 'real-store' equivalent of having so many people trying to get through the front door at once, that they all get stuck in the frame.

This is a thing that happens on the internet.

Get over it.

[Chad H.]

Indeed

I've seen stores where theres more people wanting to get in than could reasonably be accomodated and they have to wait outside. No different.

[Giles Jones]

Was a great sale if you needed a stylus for your Nintendo DS. Nothing of value on there at all when I looked.

[jason 7]

May I just say....

...that I use Ebuyer at least once a week for orders and I have yet to have an issue with them.

They often deliver far faster than I expect and their service has improved greatly over the past few years.

I wish them continued success. This I am sure is just a blip and a load of whingers moaning that they didn't get the crap crap they didn't need anyway.

No one died as a result.

[Steve Foster]

+1

I placed an order yesterday at 5.10pm, and promptly realised I'd not got the quantity of 2 I thought I'd entered. The order alteration functionality of the website is currently having a little lie down (probably all the stress from Monday), so I contacted eBuyer using this antiquated little technology called "the phone" - straight through to a human being, who had no difficulty in adjusting my order for me without any fuss. And at 8.40am this morning, I got my delivery, just as wanted (though a bit longer in bed would have been preferable!).

[Bassey]

A lot of fuss

People do get a bit hot and bothered about this sort of thing, don't they? Almost as if they have some inherent right to be the one to get the deal.

I wasn't actually aware of the £1 sale but tried to visit eBuyer to purchase a nettop. As the site wasn't responding I got it from Amazon instead.

[Annihilator]

@Bassey

Yup, we live in the age of outrage, where everyone is owed everything.

Try this fun game at home that I often like to play. Take any news article, particularly in the Mail, Express or Sun and try reversing the angle on how they presented the case.

As an example, take this very article: "Online retailer reports record customers eager to get hands on bargains, lucky few very happy" followed by a vox pop of a Dave Widdlesworth from Ipswich saying "I struggled to get into the site as it was very busy, but was delighted with product x I got for only £1!"

Try it, you can do it with just about every story, you can even add outrage to a fun/happy story if you're that way inclined, although taking the easy "think of the children!" route is cheating.

[Anonymous Coward]

some people

"Glueing the doors shut". I'd have just said lock the doors.

[Miek]

Dave Wood, commercial director at eBuyer, said that after promoting the discount day on Facebook its followers more than doubled from 20,000, "it was so much bigger than we ever thought"

It would have probably been even bigger had eBuyer emailed it's customer base instead of just placing a wastebook advert and a message on it's homepage.

I heard about this promotion on El Reg first.

[Loyal Commenter]

Except that they did email their customers too, unless you'd opted out of receiving promotional emails form them presumably.

[Miek]

No email received and after asking why I was told that it was only advertised on their website.

I receive the regular "Deals" email and did not receive the £1 bargain email.

[HamsterNet]

They did

I got an email for this promotion, but as I only seem to buy expensive things like SSDs from Ebuyer I doubted they would have anything of interest for me for £1..

[Anonymous Coward]

that would be a first for eBuyer

not emailing customers. f*cking spam merchants.

[swisstoni]

I bet there are some pretty depressed looking people in the Ebuyer marketing dept. What a great idea to make your website completely inaccessible during the busiest internet shopping day of the year. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

I'm imagining a few techies sat in a corner with an 'I told you so' look on their faces.

[Anonymous Coward]

"techies sat in a corner"

Really smart techies would have arranged to be on holiday that day, leaving the most junior techie on his own to hold the fort. It's a newb-techie right-of-passage thing.

[Scarborough Dave]

I was very annoyed!

Then I got real and thought "Oh well $#!+ happens"

Their FB page now has 53.5K likes, so overall the campaign probably worked for them, then with the PR they have had over the failure - I think if I was Dave Wood I would be happen with the result overall.

I have used Ebuyer in the past and had no issues, though I was unaware of the £1 campaign, until I went to the site and found it not working - then Googled the issue.

[david wilson]

>>"Their FB page now has 53.5K likes, so overall the campaign probably worked for them,..."

Even if there's some small gain in having more 'likes', I'd wonder if it might not be more than balanced by having quite a few of those 'likes' being people who in real life don't think ebuyer actually did a good job on Monday.

Sure, as their guy said, big companies have fucked up similar things in the past, but presumably they not only presumably knew that before they started, but they even knew how many people had responded to the emails/other promotional stuff by liking them on FB.

[Chad H.]

Was there actually anything worth buying?

Admittedly I didn't get on until around 3pm but the most exiting thing when I looked was a wii sensor bar...

[n317]

There was some great bargains appearing over the day, Blu-Ray duplicators, LCD monitors, face reignition systems e.t.c but there were never more than 20 in stock so they were gone ultra quick. I thought it was a great sale, a real shame the site fell over and a select few started crying as they did not get a £1 bargain.

[Anonymous John]

Face reignition systems?

I really can't see why anyone would want to set their face on fire more than once.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone actually get a high ticket price item discounted to £1?

I have seen a lot of comments from people who got through the checkout process only to have their order cancelled due to 'stock issues', but no comments saying that anyone successfully bought a highly discounted item.

On the face of it looks like the desirable offers of motherboards and so on were not genuine and they only actually sold crappy no brand DS styluses and other assorted warehouse sweepings for a quid....

[verloc]

it was a cockup

There were some good things to buy, £140 mobos and £130 plantronics headsets for a start - although I never managed to complete the purchase. I also then failed to buy what I originally went to ebuyer for. So i went across to misco and ordered through my business account on there.

They knew it would fall over - any muppet could see it was going to fall over. They emailed thier customer base and informed them that if they "liked" Ebuyer on facebook then they would get the sale url 30mins earlier. So people did and they got the url and the site went kerfizzbang.

Pretty annoyed by ebuyers response to be honest - so much so I have just paid up and cancelled our account with them. Just feel a bit duped by the sale but also annoyed that my regular buying was screwed because of this as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah.. bunch of shysters.

Just tried to buy a sd card from them, all of £5...

Delivery Methods

We use UPS, Royal Mail, City Link and Parcel Force to deliver packages to our customers.

Ok, fine, select delivery (with Royal Mail) Shipping Charge: Total: £1.51

Click next... oops...

Your chosen shipping option is not available for this address. We have selected a suitable alternative & displayed your new order total

New delivery charge ---> Delivery Price: £8.00 !!

Wow !

Never knew Royal Mail does not deliver to Belfast.. looks down at my Royal Mail id card, must tell my boss that tomorrow when I am sorting the mail...

[Real Name]

Just a thought...

But maybe call their customer services and explain what can easily be an error?

People jumping the gun accusing the worst is how eBuyer has gotten all this bad press...

It happens to the best of them.

[Equitas]

A favourite trick

Anonymous Coward wrote

"Bah.. bunch of shysters.

Just tried to buy a sd card from them, all of £5...

Delivery Methods

We use UPS, Royal Mail, City Link and Parcel Force to deliver packages to our customers.

Ok, fine, select delivery (with Royal Mail) Shipping Charge: Total: £1.51

Click next... oops...

Your chosen shipping option is not available for this address. We have selected a suitable alternative & displayed your new order total

New delivery charge ---> Delivery Price: £8.00 !!

Wow !

Never knew Royal Mail does not deliver to Belfast.. looks down at my Royal Mail id card, must tell my boss that tomorrow when I am sorting the mail..."

And the main reason I don't generally buy from them.

In point of fact they and a number of other companies are currently under investigation for fraudulent misrepresentation of carriage charges to the North of Scotland which they enterprisingly exclude from the UK Mainland.

Paris, because even she's not that thick!

[PaulR79]

Not angry about entitlement, disappointed at poorly planned sales

As the title says, I'm not and never was angry about it, I was just completely disappointed that after seeing it happen countless times in the past with online sales crashing sites they somehow still didn't plan properly for their own sale. As an IT company you would hope they could plan for this but it's probably more a case of marketing not giving IT enough time to get any additional hardware online in time.

To put this into perspective just look at Amazon UK and their Black Friday week (yeah.. ) and how that ran. Not once did the site fall over and if you added an item to your basket you had 15 minutes to pay for it and then it went to someone on a waiting list. There weren't exactly massive savings but the majority of items were still useful and widespread going from fitness, to games and all things in between. Having seen their sale last year I knew that it wouldn't have too many amazing deals and it didn't but there were still some good offers in general.

eBuyer sent out their marketing email offering (clearance) items for £1 with perhaps seven or eight good products through the whole seven (eight?) hours the sale was ongoing. You had no idea if you had a product even if you had gone through the buying process without a glitch which was an achievement itself. The fact that so many got "out of stock" emails after thinking they had an item shows how little stock they had too but with it being a clearance sale that's to be expected. Add to the fact their website had such issues and then they had their Facebore drone posting a new offer that was coming up and any chance it had of recovering was shot, stamped on and kicked while it was down.

[I Like Heckling]

I have had no end of problems with ebuyer over the last couple of years... 50% of the orders have involved some kind of problem.

Like the wrong graphics card turning up and the problems I had getting them to accept it's return, and then the very long delay in refunding.

Then there was the monitor I ordered last xmas, delivery set for before xmas... never turns up, they stop replying to emails and won't answer the phone from the 23rd Dec onwards and I finally get hold of some one on the 28th to find it's not even been sent, although their site says it has and I even got sent a tracking number. By this time I was a little peeved, and after a quick call to another online etailer, I purchased the identical monitor for £3 more and it was delivered the following day. The order was cancelled with ebuyer, but they still decided to send it out a week later, I refused delivery and had to call them again to complain... it took a further 2 weeks to get a refund.

and that's just 2 things in the last 12 months... I've not used them since. I don't care how good the prices are, I'd rather pay an extra couple of quid if I know I'll get good service and that if I need to call due to a problem... it will be resolved quickly.

That's why most of my tech stuff comes from aria... everything else now comes from Amazon.

[Jason Bloomberg]

Won't they ever learn?

Every 'massive discount' sale I've seen ends in tears, complaint and bitterness.

Sellers appear unable to predict the rush they will cause and can't cope (whether in real life or on the web) and there are inevitably more disappointed customers than happy ones. I'm quite sure they do themselves more harm than good and I don't believe that such negative publicity actually is better for them than none at all.

As to those hopeful punters that partake; it's sometimes difficult seeing them as anything other than a pack of starving dogs fighting over scraps but that seems to be base human nature and I can appreciate how pissed off they are when they don't think they've had an equally fair chance of snagging the bargains on offer. And likewise those punters who sulk over losing out because they don't want to get involved in an unseemly mob rush which is little more than 'legalised looting'.

Frankly, I am frequently ashamed by the desperation exhibited in the fight for bargains which brings out the worse in people and those who encourage such behaviour should equally be ashamed of themselves. There are far better and more dignified ways to reward customers than throwing meat to the pack and standing back for the onslaught.

[No such thing as an Anonymous Coward]

Glad I read the small print...

Saw the big front page display, thought it was too good to be true - then I saw that it was limited to clearance items in the small print.

[Anonymous Coward]

"an actual store not online, its the equivalent of someone glueing the doors shut! Please consider trying another sales when ur servers can handle the traffic."

How seriously can you take someone who writes like this?

[Andrew Taylor 1]

East Yorkshire Trading Standards

Now that's an oxymoron if ever there was one

[Trev 2]

Biggest problem with it is that there are a lot of complaints on FB about people getting through the checkout, Ebuyer taking the card details etc. and then later on in the day getting an "out of stock" message cancelling the order.

Seems either their system doesn't bother to check stock levels at the time you finish the purchase or it doesn't lock the item as sold for say 2 minutes to allow the checkout process to work correctly.

Be interesting to see whether people get charged and then how long it takes to do refunds.

As for using them - not a hope as they've never managed to get an order to our office on time and returns for faulty items is (or was last time we used them) email only and takes ages.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Maybe need newer servers?

After all, this article

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/07/07/ebuyer_runs_site_on_commodore64/

says the web servers are using a Commodore PET, a Commodore 64, a ZX Spectrum, an Oric Dragon32 and an MSX system. Oh and a Cray.