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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

East Yorkshire Trading Standards

Now that's an oxymoron if ever there was one