Hypothetical sale question

[Marilius]

You'd lose out to Aaron A. Aabason.

"First come, first served", 'cause it's a well known fact, "if you snooze, you lose." Or you could just sell them to people in an alphabetical order.

Aaron Abercrombie

[GUB]

Haveing faster servers and open phone lines really doesn't matter!!
There were 403 guns and 5000 customers. So what ever you do.
4597 customers never got a 858..

[Sinbad]

Hypothetical sale question.

Next time we have a similar situation to what we have just experienced with the CZ 858 sale, how would you, the retail customer like us to handle it?

I obviously grossly underestimated the amount of interest in these firearms. I expected them to take at least 24 hours to sell. Whilst we have appeared to have pleased the vast majority of customers we have also received some “hate mail” and lost some customers for life, I don’t appreciate either.

One customer made a suggestion that we should sell draw tickets for a nominal cost ($10 - $20), (this income could go to a charity?) each ticket would give the purchaser the chance to be drawn and if successful they could then purchase the firearm at the previously listed price. Draw tickets would be sold for a predetermined time, for example a week.

I favour a “Chinese Auction” list the firearm at a very high price, so in the case of the CZ-858 sale we just had, I would have listed them at $1,995.00 and then lower the price $100 per day until all sold or my reserve price was reached.

Despite all our advertising we have had two customers contact us, when is the CZ 858 sale going to start!

Anyone out there with any other ideas we could consider?

I think listing them for 1995 then going down would be a good way to lose customers,There's one with a folding stock reduced to 750 U.G.ca There's always going to be those guys at the gun shows that think their rifles are worth more than they paid.

As far as charities go.I donate to who I want.Seems everywhere you go now days somebody has there hand out asking for money a lot of these outfits asking just use peoples money do it for a tax deduction and that it.

I do know if I paid 2 k and my buddy paid 1k that would do it for me. I bought the same package 3 or 4 years ago for 699. I know all firearms have increased huge with the dollar in the sewer. But I did watch your forum during the sale for amusement purposes and a lot of people from what I read it was all they could do to purchase one.

So I think you did the right thing not gouging .You want an honest opinion you got it.

[KRJ]

To be honest this whole thing just reminded me of tickle me elmo circa 1996. It was a sale of a gun driven a lot by hype that built up demand. This is not your companies fault you brought a product to market and it took on a life of its own. If you lost customers for life they really weren't that loyal to begin with.

[purplezuk]

Just get more 858s and every one can be happy! Lol

[Dave Mishchenko]

I can appreciate the frustration that some have expressed. I'm sure many will remember pre-online sales in which getting in line and putting in your time would get your spot to get the deal. In this case there were many that were lined up at the start and failed to complete the process due to a lack of server resources. In contrast I logged in about 50 minutes after the sale started on a whim as I expected they would all be gone and managed to snag one in about 6 or 7 minutes.

This was the same case with the UTS15 sale in which case 45 minutes of click and waiting got me nothing in the end.

Last year it was mentioned that a significant investment was made in the site and hardware. Given the outage yesterday I would presume the site is hosted on premises. I think the advice given to keep the site there vs putting it in a scalable cloud service was not the best.

The advestising, process and rules for the sale were clear and just fine. Its just that the system can scale to handle the load for these great sales that keep happening.

[Nicodimous]

I didn't participate. So I can't comment on the experience. But it sounds like your site and server buckled under the pressure of high traffic.

Looking at your Google page speed results it's no wonder why.

https://developers.google.com/speed/...om&tab=desktop

Step one. Perform the recommended updates.

Step Two. Migrate to a faster server.

May be worth reevaluating your relationship with your current web team if they have not already made you aware of the issues mentioned above.

[Harris26]

You absolutely did the right thing. That is the way commerce is done today. Sports tickets, concert tickets , eBay auctions. You win some you lose some. Makes life interesting . As the Rolling Stones song says "you can't always get what you want".

[freddie.v]

Wolverine, I wouldn't change a thing. You gave more than fair warning, everyone had the opportunity to know that this product was going to be available. Granted you sold out of the rifles very quickly, and maybe that means you should have ordered more of them to fill the demand, but you cannot predict the future. For anyone boo-booing because they didn't get one, suck it up buttercup! $hit happens. No one will be there to hold your hand and make sure you get everything you want.

[P0WERWAGON]

if you would have given the rifles away for FREE, there will always be people that get but hurt and complain.

you flicked on the sale at 12, EVERYONE knew the server was going to crap itself. those that state other just lie. even if you sell tickets for a chance to buy, others would still ##### that their money didnt get them the rifle.

ask ticketmaster what they do when the tickets for a large event go on sale and their server gets overloaded. they do nothing else other than let it happen. like a boxing day sale. people line up for hours just for chance to buy what the want, no guarantee they will get it.

those that say you lost a customer for life, or the ones that asked when the sale was after it happened, are not people that i would want to deal with anyways. better for you in the long run. they are probly too busy mouth breathing or licking windows to really matter anyways.