Why “5 Simple Steps to make the most of The Great Giveaway” turned into a nightmare for millions of online bargain hunters.

Last week I received a press release from UK-based discount electronics retailer Buy It Direct.

It heralded a massive free giveaway of stock from their Huddersfield warehouse, in order to make way for new stock. That’s the story, anyway:

Buyitdirect.co.uk are holding The Great Giveaway, for one day only starting 1am Monday 4th May 2009. Thousands of high value products will be exclusively available online for FREE on a strictly first come first serve basis.

So what’s the catch? There isn’t one – buyitdirect.co.uk are expanding and need the space in the warehouse to make room for some new products. Rather than disposing of the products or sending them back to the manufacturers they decided to give Credit Crunch Consumers the chance to get their hands on some amazing products for FREE. Smeg fridges, Sony LCD TV’s, Laptops and Miele washing machines are just some of the branded products included in the promotion. The only cost the customer pays is the shipping charge of £4.95.

Staying up until 1am on a bank holiday Monday seemed a small price to pay for the possibility of bagging a bargain…

A few things didn’t sit right, though:

• At first viewing, there were only around 220 products listed, many with only one unit left in stock.
• Despite the premise that this is supposed to be a give away of old stock, an article at This Is Money suggests that the company has “also added more products to the offer to give everyone a chance of getting something.” How is that possible if this is strictly clearance?
• It felt like a hyped-up promotion simply to get attention and inbound links from major online news outlets (which they got)

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that this wasn’t primarily a marketing stunt, and in fact I don’t have a problem with that.

It’s the execution that totally sucks.

Those who registered and didn’t receive promotional codes are, ironically, the lucky ones.

• The rest of us (possibly millions?) tried desperately to access the web site with no luck. From 11pm on Sunday 3rd May (probably earlier) the web site was unreachable.
• At around 12.55am on Monday morning a “this site is experiencing heavy load, please try again in a few minutes” message appeared.
• Those who reported being able to access the site at 1am (I wasn’t one of them) said that the “good stuff” (laptops, TVs, etc) had gone within minutes.
• The company may have paid for additional bandwidth, but either this still wasn’t enough or (more likely) there was a huge bottleneck in trying to serve up pages. (Note that the site is running Windows Server 2003 and is hosted in the US)
• The FAQs said that the offer was open to anyone, not just those in the UK. That not only seems unfair but also means many more people probably tried to access the site.

When will web companies learn that they need to have infrastructure in place before trying to run these types of promotions?

“Buy It Direct” must be hoping that its reputation improves, but from what I’ve read on Twitter so far, I’m not convinced.

It’s pointless trying to appease millions of people hitting a web site and trying to purchase a couple of hundred products. Pointless.

What would have worked far better:

• Set up a simple “lucky dip” system. Given that it felt like a lottery even trying to access the site, a purely random draw would have worked better, and those who didn’t “win” anything would probably not feel so bad.
• Users would still have to visit the site to register (hence virtual footfall / linking to the site) to pick up a code and to leave their email address (marketing, see?), mailing address and credit card details (not initially charged).
• After the entry closing time, a random (automated?) draw could take place, matching each available product to a unique registration number.
• Each person is then emailed and their credit card is charged for delivery (though I’d waive that charge altogether for this kind of promotion). It’s a stipulation of entry that if you’re successful, you get what’s drawn for you and you pay. If the card is declined, another registration number is drawn instead.

Why would this work?

In a perfect, unconstrained world, the existing method chosen might seem better because you have more people browsing the site.

However, In this imperfect world (with bandwidth and server capacity constraints) very few people get a reliable, pleasing experience, which tarnishes the company’s reputation and leads to a bad taste all round. The company has to pay for tons of bandwidth, but even those who manage to view the site aren’t guaranteed to get anything. The company might get a few days worth of interest on all those £4.95 delivery charges, but that’s about the only minor monetary benefit, and even that feels rather underhanded.

Staying local

Additionally, if you are a British company, it would be much better if the promotion was only available to UK residents. I don’t have a problem with the company selling overseas, but this was a one-off promotion and it would have been better to limit the geographical scope.

Finally, on the infrastructure front, you must ensure that your server is of a decent specification and, ideally, your web hosting is based in the same country that the majority of your visitors come from. Hosting a UK-targeted site with a US ISP may make little different during normal business operations, but those extra transatlantic milliseconds all add up when the server is under strain.

Conclusions

I shudder to think how many people have been charged for delivery multiple times because they managed to get through to the order page but then the web site fell over. It doesn’t appear as if the company has a separate, robust server for handling credit card orders. Yes, they’ll get a refund (hopefully) but it’s been handled very badly indeed.

This sort of thing has happened far too many times. Companies need to assess the physical limits of their infrastructure and business before running promotions like this. Running something simpler and less server intensive would have worked far better.

Good luck to those who did manage to get the decent equipment at 1am last night. For the rest of you, I hope you didn’t spend too much of your holiday time trying to bag a bargain. Your time is more important.

Update: Just received an email from Buy It Direct:

Hi,

We’d like to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who took part in our Great Giveaway Promotion yesterday.

The response was so overwhelming that our servers struggled to keep up with demand even after some early morning tweaks from our IT guys! As a result, despite the best efforts of our support team, we know quite a few visitors experienced difficulties browsing the site and completing their orders.

Thousands of customers managed to grab a freebie and we’re now in the process of going through all the orders and allocating the stock.

Once again a huge thank you to everyone who took part. Don’t worry if you didn’t manage to managed to grab a giveaway item, there will be more special offers coming over the next few months!

Anna James
BuyitDirect

Hands up who is going to be signing up for future promotions/deals? Anyone?