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Amazon Collapses Under Weight of 1,000 Xboxes
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."
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.
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
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....
My little site.
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
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.
"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.
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.