I read about Amazon’s new Customers Vote program. According to the transcript on their site:
…Customers Vote puts you in charge this holiday season. Each week for
the next four weeks, we’re offering four products at really low prices,
and your vote will decide which product wins. It’s the perfect shopping
democracy!…Now remember two things: these prices are really low and we have
limited quantities. So don’t forget to set your timer (between all the
family, the football and the food) to purchase this week’s winning
product. That time again is 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific. So get
voting… and thanks for being an Amazon.com customer.
Today’s winner was 1,000 brand new XBox 360 core systems – each for $100. I was pretty excited about the deal and told everyone I knew about it. I logged onto the Amazon site at 10:50am this morning and was greeted with the following pages:
A connection reset page:
After refreshing the page for about 5 minutes straight, or around 11:05am I got the following message:
As you can see, they sold out 1000 units of Xbox 360 Core within 5 minutes. Bummer.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Same thing happened to me. I had my browser open at 10:55am. At about 10:58 I started opening tabs to the page… none of them resolved. A few timed out.
By the time I finally got the page to load, it was 11:06 am, and no availability.
Seems more like a lottery than anything… which HTTP connection is your server pool going to feed. Everyone else loses.
xbox picture
h