Questions about the 2019 Legendary Black Friday Sale?

[CanadianSummers]

Hello All,

We are sorry about the issues on the website. We did not expect so many people to be hitting the site, and it crashed. There are still a lot of deals left for MDT and Oryx chassis.

After screwing around for an hour I had three x .308 blem mags in my cart, one blem PRS bipod and two LA blem mags in my cart. as soon as I entered my CC info the site crashed yet again...tried to do the same purchase and when I checked out the second time it was all out of stock!

MDT will you make this right?
You can PM me if you're the type of business who appreciates your customers...

[Helka]

I missed out on some deals because of the crashing. Wish I could have snagged the LSS-XL for my Rem 700 SA. Was putting my son down for a nap and when I tried the website again it was working but sold out. Disappointing. will try again next year

[Remmy700]

Was there a phone in option at all? Would have been easier than connecting to the server out in the corner of that onion patch outside of Mumbai.

I called many times, no one ever answered.

[TA0502]

I called many times, no one ever answered.

Ah, so it was just kind of luck of the draw on who actually got to buy stuff. I thought maybe people phoned in their orders. I took 3 hours off work to make sure I was on the ball for the sale. I can buy almost everything new still but it's like adding insult to injury seeing a $900 cart with less stuff in it that the $650 cart I blew 2 hours and lost 3 hours in wages to get but couldn't pay for. It's still a deal but I can't bring myself to buy it.

[Anomaly]

Not sure why people are so salty. It was a sale, you weren't guaranteed anything. I forgot about the sale and had my infant sleeping on me and still managed to snag most of my wishlist on my phone

[Farris Bueller]

I called many times, no one ever answered.

I called 5 minutes in and they told me they were not able to process sales on the phone while the site was down. I still ended up with the chassis and mags I wanted and all under 250$. My trick was add a single item (the chassis) to your cart and checkout fast then go back for the mags. That worked out good.

[LeadMonkey]

...

[Pauly_Walnuts]

I dont think people are salty because they didn't get anything. It's more the fact that people made time to be by a computer to be able to take part in the sale and it was a massive waste of time and effort. My self in included I was at work made the necessary arrangements with my boss, wasted 60 mins of pay and came away with nothing. I'm not upset I didn't get my stock I'm upset the wasted my time on their weak server.

[Anomaly]

Obviously you aren’t familiar with retail experience expectations in this century, customers value reasonable service over unreasonable or horrific service for half price. There is an obligation to maintain your web infrastructure to support that expected service, in this day and age there is ZERO excuse for a website failure due to load, none.

Today’s modern website infrastructure can handle millions of users at once, with zero issues, THAT is the expectation when you advertise anything as ‘legendary sale, first come first serve’ because that is not at all what happened, all of the first persons got really screwed and gave up after 2 hours, then all the late people got all the deals to which they otherwise would not have been entitled to, which is viewed as an injustice.

Bottoms line, it is completely unacceptable to say ‘sorry there was too many customers the website crashed’ cause that’s like saying ‘too bad we are too cheap to pay a little more for web infrastructure to handle a moderate load when it was expected’... which is translated ‘we don’t care about our customer’s experience’... the end result is probably a couple hundred lost sales and worse yet a large percentage of those customers will never return.

This company s#!% the bed and everyone knows it, would have been better off setting the expectation of 15% everything in stock and sell the blemished stuff year round or once a month, you would have a couple hundred more happy customers and a successful sale.

Considering I work in the field of network\web infrastructure, that's a pretty cute response. Alot of much larger companies and retailers have traffic issues on Black friday. Costco, Eddie Bauer, to name a few all had issues yesterday. It's not unreasonable that the sale and web traffic exceeded their expectations and I'm sure they'll make the appropriate upgrades for next year. MDT has always had great customer service in my dealings, so it's not really fair to dump on them because you didn't get the items you wanted on sale.

[TA0502]

I think the biggest problem is how "first come, first served" turned in to "take a shot at our digital lottery!". It's VERY frustrating to take the time to be one of the first in line just to get a front throw seat watching the stock drop on the items you're there to get because people behind you in line pulled a winning ticket.

Also when it comes to web traffic, giant retailers that have server issues are handling traffic loads probably over 10 times the total number of firearms owners in all of Canada. Compare that to how many people were on the MDT site shopping for a very small and specific line of products.