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Amazon Collapses Under Weight of 1,000 Xboxes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everyone-is-falling-down dept.

theodp writes "Is there such a thing as a BusinessWeek Cover Jinx? Amazon was bitten by the success of its 1,000 Xboxes for $100 promotion, which brought the entire site to its knees for about 15 minutes on Thanksgiving Day. Singing the too-much-traffic blues on Black Friday were Wal-Mart and Disney."

12 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. They should have known better by Salvance · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I wonder why they didn't just setup a basic html page or two for the home page in order to handle the traffic. By enabling a landing page for 15 minutes or so, they could have directed all the folks seeking these incredible deals to the correct page, instead of ensuring everyone is fed dynamic CPU-intensive pages. It's not like it's the first time that Walmart or Amazon have experienced traffic spikes.

    --
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    1. Re:They should have known better by MrAnnoyanceToYou · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wouldn't that also defeat the purpose of the whole promotion though? I mean, if you're giving away a hundred x-boxes to drag as many people as possible to your site, and all you get out of them is 100 xBox sales, you've lost cash. It's the continued shopping that you're hoping for....

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      My little site.
    2. Re:They should have known better by Sigma+7 · · Score: 1, Insightful
      Wouldn't that also defeat the purpose of the whole promotion though? I mean, if you're giving away a hundred x-boxes to drag as many people as possible to your site, and all you get out of them is 100 xBox sales, you've lost cash. It's the continued shopping that you're hoping for....


      It's not that difficult to hard-code "People who buy X-Boxes also purchase" into the .HTML description page. Granted, it might not be optimal, but it works enough - at the very least, include links to hard-coded pages that show a list of common (or well-hyped) X-Box games.

      Even so, just because someone makes a one-time purchase of an XBox doesn't automatically mean money is lost. As soon as they make the purchase (and it turns out perfectly), it will add one more voice to the group of people who wonder why the "Amazon Suxors" site exists.
  2. Typical by slobber · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's what typically happens when marketing is out of touch with engineering. My educated guess would be that marketing droids "forgot" to mention this promotion to engineering. If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.

    And of course it was the tech team which ended up spending its holidays fixing the site, not marketing. (You can probably tell that I am taking it a bit personally and for a reason...)

    --
    "You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
  3. ..and now this! by TheSpatulaOfLove · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Jeez - You would've thought they were selling Bags Of Crap with the way that server went down...



    On a serious note. They knew this was coming. It was marketed heavily and they should be ashamed for not being prepared to handle the onslaught of refreshers.

    1. Re:..and now this! by Firehed · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They probably were about as prepared as they could have been. Sometimes, doubling your fleet of servers for a single known traffic spike just isn't a viable choice. Especially if the reason for the traffic spike is a loss leader to begin with.

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
  4. Stupid promotion anyway by iendedi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How does Amazon think that a promotion like that would increase overall sales anyway? What they should have done is said that XBoxs will be onsale randomly throughout the day, so check the price from time to time to see if you are a lucky recipient of the sales price. There will be 100 randomly allocated sales items to customers each hour until the promotion ends.

    That would bring more traffic to their website and keep it there all day. Much better idea!

    Oh wait... Hmm....

    --

    It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
  5. Re:Heh. by omeomi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is it just me, or is the first year I've really noticed any sort of competitive pricing on game systems. Generally it hasn't mattered too much where you bought your game system, because they were pretty much exactly the same price wherever you looked. But this year, I got an ad for a $100 rebate on an XBox360 from MicroCenter, and now this stunt by Amazon...

    ...wish I'd gotten one...

    --
    ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
  6. Microsoft paid Amazon to have this deal by ConfusedSelfHating · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No I don't have proof, but having the most prominent retail website in the world hawk your product is worth a lot of cash. The $100 special gets reported by multiple media sources, "1000 Xbox 360s sell out in 9 minutes", "Demand for Xbox 360s brings down Amazon's website". If Sony wants the headlines of people going crazy about the PS3, why wouldn't Microsoft want the same? Does anyone believe that 10 minutes of poor connectivity will hurt a website's reputation? Server problems yes, super cheap deals no. "Oh no, too many people are coming to our website for the great, great deals!" People are going to associate Amazon's name with amazing one time sales, which is only going to help them. Both Microsoft and Amazon have benefited from this sale.

  7. Re:No Chance by Main+Gauche · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "I imagine that disabling images and what not would improve your chances. Simple common sense stuff,"

    Disabling images is common sense... until they throw a captcha (or other critical graphic) at you that you need to see to claim the prize.

  8. Re:No Chance by ergo98 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    You are the first person I have seen claim they got the code.

    Only 1000 people got the code. 1000 is a very small number, and it's unlikely that many of those 1000 happen to visit the same online hangouts that you do.

    This whole thing is rather absurd (I'm speaking more to comments on the linked page rather to your specific comment - excuse me while I blather) - a bunch of people got their hopes up, against tremendous odds (it wasn't a small number of people who knew about this deal. I was at lunch and a lunchmate, who I thought was entirely unconnected with technology, commented that they had to get back to the office to get their "$100 xbox360"), and when they didn't "win" therefore the whole thing must be a giant scam, etc. Or...maybe, just maybe, 1000 other people beat them to it, among hundreds of thousands of people trying for the same thing.

    [Checking lottery ticket]

    OH MAN I DIDN'T WIN! THIS IS BULLSHIT! THE WHOLE THING IS A GIANT SCAM!
  9. Re:Heh. by cowscows · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Only a retard would say that. It would make no sense at all for Amazon to fake it. Let's say they lost $200 per xbox selling them in this promotion. With 1000 boxes for sale, that's $200,000. A good chunk of change, no doubt, but not really difficult to come by for a company with a market value in the billions of dollars. They've gotten a ton of press out of it, and all for a fraction of the cost of a 30 second superbowl ad.

    Sure, they could've faked it, and then just relied on an overloaded website to avoid having to give out any real deals, but why would they want to have to deal with the potential PR problems if that truth got out? It would be beyond foolish for this to have all been a scam.

    --

    One time I threw a brick at a duck.