I'm forced to revise my initial opinion of NYX's Anniversary Sale fiasco. While I still maintain that it was simply a freak accident without an easy fix, a business has to do whatever it takes to keep their customers happy. While it's impossible to buy additional server space to fix the website bandwidth in time before the sale ends, there are other routes they could have taken to assuage their customers. At first, I couldn't help but to err on the side of empathy because all I could think was "What if that happened to me?" But keeping in that same mindset, I couldn't help but to think about what I would to do keep my customers.
When they initially agreed to extend the sale, I thought that seemed pretty fair. But now there's one hour left in the extended sale, and the website has still not been fixed, rendering the extension useless. Now they say they're giving a 50% coupon code, which is better than nothing, but it certainly doesn't compare to the original sale they offered ($1.20 for all cosmetic items).
After the onslaught of demands that they end the sale and reintroduce it once the bandwidth issue has been resolved, I'm certain that's what I would have done for my business. I would have been tempted to keep the sale going, because even though there is only a small percentage of customers that are able to complete orders, that percentage works out to be enough people to cause many items to sell out. However, continuing the sale and reintroducing it later gives an unfair advantage to those who have already made a purchase as it would give them a second opportunity to take advantage of the sale. This probably isn't something that would cross my mind if it hadn't been for the barrage of Facebook comments describing how unfair it is that only a select few have the sale available to them, and finally others have gotten through after waiting 7, 12, 20 hours or more, only to find that most of the products have already been sold out.
Secondly, if I were them, I'd have to take extreme precaution in reintroducing the sale. I honestly can't imagine how much server space they'd need to get their hands on to accommodate over 55,000 Facebook fans alone. I think I'd have to find a way to split up the sale so that there aren't so many people trying to log on all at the same time. I might even go so far as to offering the sale 10 more times, making it available to residents of 5 states at a time.
For example, I could offer the sale to residents of Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida on June 1st for 12 hours, using discount code TNSGF120. Then take a couple of days to restock sold out products and offer the sale to residents of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Deleware, and Pennsylvania on June 5th for 12 hours, using discount code VWMDP120.
This is of course, assuming there's a way to verify the restrictions of the discount code against the locations given in the billing and shipping addresses. I'm not that tech savvy just yet, but I imagine there's a way to do it.
And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many, many other ways around it. Now would be the time to spend some extra money on a consultation from an extreme web developer pro.
There's simply nothing that any business can do to keep all of your customers happy all of the time (something you learn quickly as a waitress, lol). But when you get 15 angry customers PER MINUTE for a solid 24 hours telling you to take down the sale and reintroduce it when you're better prepared, that kind of seems like a no-brainer.
I still can't find it in my heart to be nearly as angry as many of the other customers are, but I must admit that I have grown severely disappointed in the way NYX has been handling the situation. I hope they step up their game and offer something much better than the 50% coupon.
The reintroducing the sale and doing it a few states at a time sounds like an excellent idea to me.
ReplyDeleteI'm not really mad at them either, definitely not cussing at them on their facebook wall mad or whatever but as you said disappointed. :/
Plus there is the fact that they expected their customers to keep trying all night long but there was no one from NYX available to monitor to situation and deal with things like people on the facebook wall claiming that credit card information was being swapped. IE when someone gets to the checkout page someone else's name and credit card info shows up on the screen... I seriously doubt that was happening due to it being a secure checkout process but a lot of people were freaking out about it and there was no one online to address it. In my opinion it would have made sense to have at least a bare bones staff work overnight.