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Tube Sale Aftermath- (we’re sorry)
Posted by Alex Fugazi on Saturday, May 26th, 2012 at 2:35 am

 

Hello everyone- Alex Fugazi here.

Our tube sale yesterday went surprisingly well, in that 100′s of people tried to purchase one- which was 100′s more than we actually had in inventory. It also went surprisingly bad, because the website couldn’t handle the traffic and some customers had- uh- ‘less than optimal’ experiences on the website during our sale.  Epic slow-down of checkout, and carts that seemed to empty themselves were reported to us. This is not how we like to do business, and we know it’s not how you like to shop.

We announced the exact drop time of the tube sale (2pm CST) as we didn’t want to just say ‘sometime today’ and have a bunch of our customers having to spend all day in front of their computer waiting for something they didn’t know if they were going to get or not. BUT- instead what happened is that a number of customers spent 20 minutes or more trying to check out and not getting what they wanted in the first place. Which is really just as annoying. Believe us- we understand it.

We’re working with our e-commerce provider to try to work out the kinks in the check-out system and hopefully this won’t happen as badly again.  But, obviously- when selling limited edition items, something like this will PROBABLY happen with any high-profile drop. We just want to make sure it doesn’t happen as badly.

QUESTION TIME-

Would you all prefer us to keep announcing drop times, which could cause sticky drops like this, or start doing them randomly? Please leave a comment below!

Overall, you people were VERY kind and understanding, and this doesn’t go unnoticed by the people working here.  We here at Nakatomi have always tried to cultivate a customer base of reasonable, sane people- and this has shown success in that regard. No one sent death threats or tried to eat my cat over this. Thank you. Not that we’re opposed to selling to insane cat-eaters, but we don’t SEEK out that sale. Did that make sense? Please don’t eat our cats.

If for some reason, you placed an order and don’t receive a shipping confirmation email by the end of this next week- do email us and we’ll get to the bottom of it!

If you HAVE emailed us about a customer service issue, you have heard back from us already. If you have an issue and haven’t emailed us- hit the contact form link above and we’ll get right on it.  Please note- just because you post about a customer service issue on our Facebook wall or Twitter, or on an external site/message board that is not ours- doesn’t mean we’ll see it. If you have an issue, the best way by far is to email us directly and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.  Send us an email, please!

From Biafrah Winfrey, Tim Doyle, the crew in the Print-Lab, and the rest of us- thank you for your continued support, and we’ll do our best to keep all of you in awesome art.

Thanks-

Alex Fugazi

Nakatomi- “Please don’t eat our cats!”

Posted by Alex Fugazi on Saturday, May 26th, 2012 at 2:35 am. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • Cutter

    I think the right balance is doing a random drop within some range of time. “Hey, our tubes will be onsale some time between 12pm-2pm CST tomorrow”

  • Anonymous

     Yah- that might be the best way to go in the future. That way the most we waste of a customer’s time is an hour. I hate wasting ANY time for anyone, but it might be the best way, considering.

  • Bradley Spink

    I like this idea, especially since being on the other side of the world means I’m already having to wake up early or stay up all night for the drops. At least this way it means I also don’t have to spend 40 minutes trying to checkout.

  • nivag

    Being the other side of the pond having a timed release is better for me as I’m not sitting around waiting for a drop. Unless you don’t do them on Friday, Saturday and Wednesdays as that’s valuable drinking time you’re cutting into :)

  • Mr X

    I’d sooner know the exact time of the drop and fight the Internet. Unfortunatly I’d say that most of us have jobs to sustain our print addiction. We risk loosing that job on a weekly by wasting company time F5ing.

  • Anonymous

     Yah- that’s exactly our reasoning on announcing the time ahead of schedule. We want people to be able to get in and get out and then go about their day. Sitting at your computer hitting F5 all day seems like a terrible waste. But I also understand why other shops do this- to avoid site crashes.  Hrrrrm.

  • dea123456

    I have to concur with mister x. Most other sites I deal with for purchasing posters or concert tickets usually provide an exact time. Having a full time job away from a computer means I have to use my phone at a specific timeframe. I got server errors on my phone but was still able to make it through. I would absolutely deal with that again knowing the risk involved.

  • Newhousebailey

    I like a set time. Even though I was someone who had the tube in my cart right at 2:00 and ended up missing the deal due to server issues, I prefer that to hoping to catch a random tweet. Keep up the great work!

  • Dalyn

    I have to say I prefer knowing exactly when the poster goes on sale.  I don’t even bother buying from sites that do random drops, like Mondo.  That is just a combination of not knowing when it goes on sale, and not being able to get through their servers if you do happen to be on the exact second they do go on sale.  At least if I can’t get through on your server, I didn’t waste all morning refreshing Twitter for hours, so I don’t feel like I wasted my time.

  • Norajane

    Prefer random time drop. Every give a thought to a lottery for the tubes? May be hard to admin but not so nutty as the drop was yesterday.
    Nora D.

  • Marek Koenig

    I suggest moving the website to Windows Azure. That way they can have servers automatically spin up to cover the extra demand.

  • Dan Golub

    I was one of the lucky ones who, at 2:41 received confirmation of purchase. With that said, I was ready to throw my laptop, desktop, and phone into the woodchipper due to frustration.  But, this is a weekly and sometimes daily occurance in the cut-throat, kill a cat or be killed by a cat world of print collecting. A “random” drop would just spread the server demand out and create less server errors, but I think that server errors are a part of the game we sick people play. 

    I like the idea of a “random time window” – that would probably be the best solution, short of putting 1,000 tubes together.  But like I say, it’s part of the game… we all deal with it… we all grumble about it… and we are all super psyched when we pop the top off a fresh Nakatomi TUUUUUUUUBE.

  • Erikgustafson

    NO RANDOMS! !!!!!!!! i would rather the whole thing sell out in ten minutes and i not get one than sit around all day f5ing.

  • Charles Lentz

    If you expect such a deluge of orders, just hold a lottery for the sale. That way everyone has an equal chance and it’s hard to argue with the results. Just use a random number generator to pick the winners and then notify by email for them to purchase. Makes sense to me.

  • Tim V.

    f5ing for more than an hour is a frustrating waste of time.  However, it at least gives the merchant’s system a fighting chance to avoid crashing as opposed when the exact drop time is known.

  • Nara Ramanujan

    I like this idea. What you and Cutter are suggesting makes the most sense for everyone.  I’d rather spend an hour or less F5ing and know that I got something or not right away, than spending 40 mins trying to check out over 30 times via Paypal, which is what happened to me yesterday.  BTW, after all that, I wasn’t even able to get a tube!  And I’m foreign, so you should be glad my cat allergies have become so severe that eating that super-cute cat of yours, is not an option…anymore!   ;)

  • http://www.nathanbeach.com/ Nathan Beach (nakatomi)

    As the person who’s going to have to figure out how to make this work next time, I kind of like the idea of a lottery (as some mentioned previously) or a “take a number” system.  Kind of like at the DMV.  You show up at 2PM and enter your email address and name into a simple form, and get a number.  Then we set up the order for you and you pay for it.  Something like that.

    There should be no problem for a webserver to handle that kind of traffic all at once.  I do think that our unnamed ecommerce platform provider had Epic Ecommerce Failure over this, as the web server basically wasn’t able to keep up with the traffic, then I’m sure sessions got lost (during your “server errors”), and relaying out to PayPal for a few minutes then getting back into the fray didn’t help, I’m sure.  Gawd.

  • Dudebub

    i agree with this. i dont like random drops. im generally at work when i get prints and i cant stop working for 2 hours to get these. 

  • Bradley Spink

    Maybe this one opinion doesn’t count much, but I think having a true lottery is a bad way to go. I’d rather have lost out due to not knowing when something dropped, or fighting server errors, than to know that it is by definition down to luck as to whether I get something or not.

    The “take a number” system sounds good to me, though.

  • Justin

    My thoughts: I’d prefer to know the on-sale time but have the servers handle the traffic better. Perhaps this isn’t possible, but it would be nice to have your purchase or be shut out within a few minutes. I know not everyone can win with a limited item. But I’d rather know in 5 minutes rather than 30. Thanks!

  • Dontbelievehislies

    A random drop is preferable to me. The people solely out to flip prints have it slightly more difficult then.

  • postulio

    I’d rather spend 40 minutes trying to check out than 2 hours monitoring a website. I am at work and the least amount of time i spend trying to get the prints the better.

    My only other recommendation is to do it like cinema overdrive does it: send out an email talking about a drop and the first responders saying “i want” get it (usually we have to send the reply to a different address). if the buyer doesn’t Paypal the money within 12 hours, their print is available again. I like this way because it us easy to track who responds first, who pays attention to the emails and who actually reads them for the instructions.

    I believe Stout has a good way of doing it too, everyone who wants a print emails him and he chooses people at random.

  • stanley

    I don’t like cinema overdives way because if I read the email too late it’s gone already
    I like stouts way – a time frame for responding and then a lottery
    I like an exact (or small window of) time aswell, but we need better servers!

    Have more tubes available!
    Print more amazing stuff!

    Ask for more money – no don’t do that!

    cheers

  • Getmyemail

    Specific time works best so as to not be distracted from work for extended periods. End of line.

  • Rick

    I would prefer to keep it the way it is now… announcing the time of the drop (maybe just work on getting more reliable uptime on the servers). Personally, I feel my chances would be higher the current way than a lottery system where customers would have multiple entries (spouses, friends, etc.). Say you have over a thousand entries for a 100-print run… I’d rather take my chances with a flooded server than a 1 in 10 shot every time I want to buy a print. Maybe talk to Emek or Justin at Mondo, their servers seem pretty reliable consistently, just my two cents.

  • Dudebub77

    agreed ten fold

  • http://www.nathanbeach.com/ Nathan Beach (nakatomi)

    (sorry for double posting, just realized I should have written in this thread)

    Just a little follow up here on the performance issues seen during the last tube sale.  We have just implemented CloudFlare, which is a site performance optimizing and caching service for these kinds of situations.  I’m seriously amazed by the potential of CloudFlare so far, but we won’t see concrete analytics until we run with it for a few weeks.  And really, the true test will be another big timed sale.
    We’ve also talked with our ISP about temporarily ramping us up to a higher echelon of service during future big timed sales, which they can do.  So, basically, I think we’ll probably just do the sale the same way next time (that is, a timed free-for-all).  Sorry for the total e-commerce meltdown last time!

    – Biafrah Winfrey, CTO