I got many brochures and ads (by email and by regular mail) announcing an online event starting on December 24th at 8pm on www.futureshop.ca. I do not use to believe in these discounts, but this year I needed to buy a new MP3 player (read other posts on my old player that I had to return to the manufacturer). That is, I decided to experience the boxing day online on futureshop.
I was there at 8pm despite the fact that I was at a relative Christmas eve diner. I started to browse and have chosen my MP3 player (SanDisk Sansa of 8 Go - the new model - at 139.00$ with no discount by the way - I have noticed the same price a couple of days before -). Problems started when I decided to move forward and pay it... I got a screen asking me to "Wait" until a cashier was available. While the idea is pretty original, I was anyway surprised since online stores are supposed to avoid the line up... But there was a line up. A virtual line up.
After waiting for more than 10 minutes in the virtual line up, I gave up but let the computer on and I came back few times to check where I was. After around half an hour, I was kicked off from the site and got the following message:
Nous vous remercions de visiter futureshop.ca. Nous sommes désolés mais étant donné le volume beaucoup plus important auquel nous ne nous attendions pas sur notre site, nous ne sommes pas en mesure de recevoir plus de clients sur le site pour le moment. Vous êtes actuellement en attente pour accéder au site et vous devriez pouvoir magasiner dans quelques minutes. Entre temps, n'hésitez pas à jeter un coup d'œil sur notre circulaire du jour d'après Noël et celle du jour d'après Noël, en ligne seulement, en entrant votre code postale ci-dessous.
Thank you for visiting futureshop.ca. We're sorry, but due to much larger than anticipated traffic to our site, we are unable to accept more customers on the site at this moment. You're currently in a queue to access the site and should be able to shop in just a few minutes. In the meantime, feel free to check out our Boxing Day flyer and web-only Boxing Day flyer by entering your postal code below.
It's surprising that I got kicked off while I was at the point of buying my MP3 device. Anyway, later in the evening, things seemed to be better. I could get again on the site but my cart was empty. Now the player is 10$ above the price (149$) and I could not buy it (at the time I came back to the site, it was too late and I had to leave my relatives).
At the age of internet, there seems to be some companies that still do not want to invest enough in load testing and enough hardware to fulfill their promises. After all, if online experience becomes as painful as personal experience, next time, I just head to the nearest store and buy my next device... At least, I will see in advance that there is a line up (if any) and decide whether or not I would like to buy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment