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General suggestions or questions about the SparkFun Electronics website
By master_of_robots
#89543
johngineer wrote: ASCII depictions of the male reproductive organ...personally I thought it was hilarious...
*takes a bow*
User avatar
By phalanx
#89546
avio wrote: I would also urge you Sparkfun to take your lumps. If you try to delete
the negative comments it will make it that much worse.
Negative comments have not and will not be deleted.

Derogatory comments are fair game for moderation.

-Bill
By chas
#89547
johngineer wrote: <snip>
(personally I thought it was hilarious, though I understand why it was removed).
I saved it to a notepad for future use. :D
By HappyKillmore
#89551
It is extremely clear that the SparkFun website was not prepared for this event. I can't see how it could have been. The real trick will be on damage control from SparkFun. Obviously, there is no way that everyone could get their $100 order for free. That's why they put a limit on the total dollar amount.

However, will SparkFun build more ill-will from this giveaway or more happy customers? Time will tell.

On a side note, ever since their announced server change a month or so ago, things have fun FAR slower than before the server change. It seems like a big step backwards.
By avio
#89553
phalanx wrote:
avio wrote: I would also urge you Sparkfun to take your lumps. If you try to delete
the negative comments it will make it that much worse.
Negative comments have not and will not be deleted.

Derogatory comments are fair game for moderation.

-Bill
Glad to hear it... that is the best way to handle this. Now a message from the CEO would be cool and go along way toward mending fences.

Something like: "yea we screwed up, we were not prepared for this, but hey, how cool is it that we just GAVE AWAY $100K?"
Last edited by avio on Thu Jan 07, 2010 11:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
By greensasquatch
#89556
-as someone else mentioned, offer a deep discount (i.e. 50% or more off first $100). I'd be curious to see what the median order value was... were most people just ordering exactly $100 worth of stuff (i.e. all free except S&H)?
Agreed

Anyone from Sparkfun care to chime in?

Offer me a coupon code to save a bit and I'll load up my cart and spend $200 right now.
By avio
#89558
greensasquatch wrote:
-as someone else mentioned, offer a deep discount (i.e. 50% or more off first $100). I'd be curious to see what the median order value was... were most people just ordering exactly $100 worth of stuff (i.e. all free except S&H)?
Agreed

Anyone from Sparkfun care to chime in?

Offer me a coupon code to save a bit and I'll load up my cart and spend $200 right now.
Do that and most of the bad feelings will go away.
By tetsujin
#89562
Oh yeah - also, Sparkfun - since I didn't get in on Free Day, if you could be so kind as to cut me a check for $100 and just send it to me along with a personal apology, I'm sure I can contrive some rationalization for how this is good for your business. It would make me ever such a loyal customer, in theory, and it would ease the horrible burden of having gotten my hopes up and being unfairly denied my access to free loot by the big corporations and the UN sanctions levied against me and also the fact that you purposely arranged for your company to be halfway across the country from me, thus ensuring that I personally would not be able to reach the site while it was being hammered...

Do I really have to spell it out? I'm very worried that if I don't, people will misunderstand, and think I'm being serious here... XD
By chris12892
#89564
I'm not too upset that I didn't get anything, although I do wish Sparkfun would have more sales. I don't think I have ever seen anything marked off to any percentage.

Regardless, I will be placing my order in a few days after everything calms down.
By bigkahuna
#89565
HappyKillmore wrote:...However, will SparkFun build more ill-will from this giveaway or more happy customers? Time will tell..
First time customer here. In spite of numerous attempts, never got to fully load a single webpage (even with in-line images turned off), so never even had a chance. As to whether it will influence my future buying decisions, I'd say no. I'm still going to shop around when I need to buy something. Did the process piss me off? Maybe only mildly, I took a chance, wasted several minutes and a bunch of mouse clicks and came up empty handed. Not the first time that's happened to me nor will it be the last. I think it was a great marketing ploy, got SF a fair bit of attention and got me off my duff to visit their site (although I never actually -visited- the site). I think it would have been -much- more successful had it somehow managed to handle the mass of traffic more efficiently. Rather than building excitement, the process was just mildly irritating. Any hoo, congrats to those who got their freebees. ;)
By playmobil
#89568
I'm frustrated with the Free Day. I live in Brazil, and I tried the last step of payment by many... many... maany times... without success. It was my last chance to buy my IMU parts. Unfortunately, I don't have money to pay all the high taxes of importation of my country. Gone away all the hopes that I had put on that only one chance. So... i'm very... very sad. :cry:
By nbviper
#89569
I appreciate the attempt by SparkFun, but do they realize they just gave away $95,000 to Internet savvy (auto-refreshing the site on multiple PCs), deal a day users, who will never buy from them again? A bet only 50 or so actual repeat customers actually go through the checkout process. I spent 2 hours just trying to pay for shipping.

Not saying I won't buy from SparkFun again in the future, but I will definitely shop around.
By raymor
#89570
Another possibly constructive idea or two for future promotions:

Offer free of deep discounts on things like PIC programmers which
will probably result in future sales. Someone who gets a programmer
at a deep discount or free will probably use it to do several future
projects, projects which will require ordering more stuff from Sparkfun
in the future

I should have talked to sparkfun earlier about how we, or some other
people, could help them avoid the problems from the overloaded servers.
By tetsujin
#89580
nbviper wrote:I appreciate the attempt by SparkFun, but do they realize they just gave away $95,000 to Internet savvy (auto-refreshing the site on multiple PCs), deal a day users, who will never buy from them again? A bet only 50 or so actual repeat customers actually go through the checkout process. I spent 2 hours just trying to pay for shipping.
See, I get what you're saying about how probably a lot of the winners were "internet savvy" and used all manner of scripting trickery and so on to increase their chances - and that probably a lot of these just came for the free stuff and won't stay (I really wonder how much of all that is actually true though - I have no idea...) - But, so what? The whole thing was a game. What's wrong with someone who knows how to play the game well actually using that knowledge? I mean, consider the audience of this site...

And I have to say: if you spent two hours trying to load http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/checkout_shipping.php, then you're not nearly savvy enough. I mean, I did a little tinkering a day or two before Free Day, and you know what I found? You can skip checkout_shipping (if you're OK with the default shipping option) by going directly to http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/checkout_payment.php... That's one painful, thrashed page load you can simply skip... All with just the tiniest bit of "internet savvy"...
By SodaAnt
#89581
tetsujin wrote:You can skip checkout_shipping (if you're OK with the default shipping option) by going directly to http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/checkout_payment.php... That's one painful, thrashed page load you can simply skip... All with just the tiniest bit of "internet savvy"...
That didn't do me any good. I got to the payment page three times and after filling in the data and clicking on "continue" the site bounced me back to the previous page. All three times. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
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