budsgunshop black friday scam? was anyone on here able to buy the doorbusters?

[bhhacker]

Just wanted to let people know of my extreme displeasure with the establishment that is Budsgunshop.com. They were having 0800 EST Black friday sales and experienced a website outage from 0750 to 0915 EST. As soon as it was fixed they were conveniently out of stock of all their sales items and i literally cannot get any confirmations of any actual sales. If a website is down there is no possible way for them to complete sales! I normally dont do this but was burned by this company for the second time.



Anyone on here able to confirm any of those black friday deals? There are reports of people putting those items in their carts, and by the time they checked out, BGS had swapped out the prices for full retail!

They have deleted all 800 facebook posts about everyone talking about their black friday sales or lack thereof. It just seems very suspicious. They also have removed all evidence of their black friday deals on facebook, however, slickguns is still showing it. It seems like they are trying to slip this under the rug. I hope it doesnt come across as whining because i understand that there will be limited quantities of things and if they sold out, well, better luck next year, but literally NONE of those posters or people across many websites have been able to confirm a single actual purchase.



So any of you guys get lucky?

 

[Praxidike]

They didn't really have anything worth fussing over imho... Most online retailers are giving "deals" on guns that are way expensive (over $1k) or guns that aren't great sellers under normal circumstances...

 

[ColtPythonElite]

Maybe they made their sales in their stores.

 

[B_Li_Ber_Tar_Ian]

I got one of the Caniks and shotguns in my cart at sale price, got all the way to entering my CC info before the site crashed. By the time it came back around the items were showing out of stock. I later got an email saying I had items left in my cart. Sure enough, there was the items in stock but at regular price. Oh well, I had pretty much switched to Ky Gun Co for most of my on line purchases.

 

[bhhacker]

They had 3 things i was interested in.

Canik 55-99$

Tisas 9mm-99$

Emperor Home Defense shotgun-49$


Open letter i have sent to BGS


Hello there,
My name is Joseph Garrett and i live in Juneau, Alaska. I got up at 3am my time in order to try and get ready with logging into your website and making sure i could expediently get to your deals when they came online. I had nothing but problems. I was able to add the emperor shotgun and canik 55 in my cart but was not able to continue where i needed to input my FFL information.

Now i understand there is a lot of people trying to get onto your site and having it be bogged down, but that website was down from 0750 EST to about 0915 EST and that website was plain unnavigable. Conveniently enough once the website was back up and running perfectly, your three doorbuster deals were out of stock. Let me ask you this, why is it that right then and there your doorbusters are out of stock when NOBODY could use your website? It doesnt make sense. I started looking at your facebook posts to see if others had this problem, and after a few hours noticed that one, no one has heard of anyone actually getting one of these, and two, you deleted all the posts about this. It almost seems like you are trying to sweep this under the rug, and three, you then deleted any posts you had of black friday deals on these items. That is downright suspicious.

This is the second time ive been burned by BGS. I have ordered from you in the past and the last time i had, I ordered a Canik55 from you. It said it had adjustable sights, and had a chrome barrel. The picture AND your website showed that. when it came, it had neither. I called you guys up and you offered me 25$ off of my next purchase with you guys. Is this bait and switch tactic becoming a thing?
I want to hope that this is a big misunderstanding with you guys but with everything I am seeing i am beginning to wonder. I am hoping there is away you can make it right for us. Is there?
Thank you for your time,

Joseph Garrett

 

[GlockFan]

I had pretty much the same experience as everybody else. I bet that some people did get the deals but it took time. At 10 minutes to 7 there were 4000 shoppers. By the time I gave up at 7:30 the site showed 9500 shoppers. My guess is they were just overloaded with traffic and couldn't handle it. I should have stayed in bed and slept in

 

[mgmorden]

Realistically the whole sale was a bit foolish on their part. I'm sure they didn't have many of the items available AT ALL at the "doorbuster" price but realistically they still needed to have the servers prepped to handle tens of thousands of shoppers TRYING to get those items.

If your website crashes right when your sale is supposed to be going on you've messed up bad. If shoppers legitimately just don't manage to grab one of the items then so be it, but if they can't even get into your digital doors they're going to feel cheated.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

Realistically the whole sale was a bit foolish on their part. I'm sure they didn't have many of the items available AT ALL at the "doorbuster" price but realistically they still needed to have the servers prepped to handle tens of thousands of shoppers TRYING to get those items.

LOL, the problems y'all are talking about are just the same sort of inventory problems and limited sales all the other big box stores are doing. Just because you showed up early to TARGET doesn't mean you could one of the TV super deals. And sure enough, you probably suffered long lines frustrations, confusion, and general lack of sufficient infrastructure.

None of the stores are doing a very good job of handling the glut of customers. Some are doing better than others, but problems still abound.

 

[ColtPythonElite]

Last night, I walked in Walmart an hour and a half after after the doors opened, stood in no line, and bought one of the TV teaser deals at the 8 o'clock event. I had to wait 30 minutes before, I could buy and then only stood in a check out line about 10 minutes. It was pretty painless and a big savings.

Back on Bud's and guns. This week, I was in their Sevierville store. They were selling their advertised specials at a brisk pace.

 

[tnxdshooter]

Just wanted to let people know of my extreme displeasure with the establishment that is Budsgunshop.com. They were having 0800 EST Black friday sales and experienced a website outage from 0750 to 0915 EST. As soon as it was fixed they were conveniently out of stock of all their sales items and i literally cannot get any confirmations of any actual sales. If a website is down there is no possible way for them to complete sales! I normally dont do this but was burned by this company for the second time.



Anyone on here able to confirm any of those black friday deals? There are reports of people putting those items in their carts, and by the time they checked out, BGS had swapped out the prices for full retail!

They have deleted all 800 facebook posts about everyone talking about their black friday sales or lack thereof. It just seems very suspicious. They also have removed all evidence of their black friday deals on facebook, however, slickguns is still showing it. It seems like they are trying to slip this under the rug. I hope it doesnt come across as whining because i understand that there will be limited quantities of things and if they sold out, well, better luck next year, but literally NONE of those posters or people across many websites have been able to confirm a single actual purchase.



So any of you guys get lucky?

It pissed me off to because I was there and ready and it kept crashing.

 

[vamo]

They had a few dirt cheap guns of course they went in a blink of an eye. I'm sure the website being down was due to extreme traffic. You have to go into something like that with the understanding that the probability of getting one of those 3 items is very very low.

 

[tnxdshooter]

They had a few dirt cheap guns of course they went in a blink of an eye. I'm sure the website being down was due to extreme traffic. You have to go into something like that with the understanding that the probability of getting one of those 3 items is very very low.

Its my undersanding nobody got anything.

 

[bhhacker]

Thats what im saying. Im a grownup. I understand that getting one of those items is going to be difficult. From what i have seen, NO ONE has gotten those items. It wasnt a fair deal to begin with. The fact that they deleted everything pertaining to those sales and their actions cement it for me. Will not use budsgunshop ever again

 

[Bruce Hanson]

Same experience here for myself and a friend who was also trying to get the Canik. I called them while the website was still down and they said the item was already sold out.

 

[vamo]

They were obvious bait offers that were meant to sell out almost instantly. Just because you don't know of someone who got one doesn't mean that nobody did.

 

[DT Guy]

On an ordinary day, there are HUNDREDS of people on Buds' website; I can only imagine the traffic this morning.

Expecting to get a 'black Friday' deal is simply unrealistic, IMHO; those are more lottery than shopping.


Larry

 

[george burns]

You have to know the market to shop on Buds, many times the guns are going for close to or full retail. Unless they are just blowing something out, like they did last year on S&W 340PD's for 500. They just wanted them gone, I blew that deal, but otherwise they sometimes sell the same gun, like CZ P01, on the site for 548, and on slickguns, for 500. So I always wait for something to hit slickguns, which is over a doze of the biggest and cheapest gun stores in the country on one page, Buds, Limbo's Kentucky, etc.
But you have to set alerts on the guns you're interested in or they will sell out and you will never know they came by.

 

[BigBL87]

It wasn't so much the fact I didn't get it, it was the way it happened. The website issues I wasn't surprised, in fact I was going to cancel two orders elsewhere to redirect the money for this, but didn't because I thought what happened might occur. After they were "out of stock" of their doorbusters they had the same items posted at full price in stock. It's classic bait and switch, which is an unethical business practice. When people started complaining and asked them to at least address it, they started deleting Facebook comments and locked their wall from posting, and never actually apologized for the issue or even addressed it. They deleted all the ads related to it on their Facebook page too. It was just overall poorly managed and handled on their part. They lost me as a customer, whether that matters to them or not.

 

[mgmorden]

LOL, the problems y'all are talking about are just the same sort of inventory problems and limited sales all the other big box stores are doing. Just because you showed up early to TARGET doesn't mean you could one of the TV super deals. And sure enough, you probably suffered long lines frustrations, confusion, and general lack of sufficient infrastructure.

None of the stores are doing a very good job of handling the glut of customers. Some are doing better than others, but problems still abound.

Not quite. As a realistic analogy - if you stood in line at Target and they ran out - no big deal. If you stood in line, and come opening time they announced they they were having trouble with the door locks and nobody could enter the store, then an hour later they said "Hey guys we got the doors unlocked but everything's sold out already." then some people are going to be mad and skeptical.

You might not actually get a doorbuster - but you expect to get inside the store. That's what went wrong with Buds. Even if they only had 5 of those $99 pistols actually for sale - a national website needs to be able to handle ~30k-40k visitors whenever they go up for sale, if only to correctly tell them the items are sold out.

 

[USAF_Vet]

While it may seen suspicious that the ads were removed, it's likely they did so because the items were sold out. Just because the website crashed for you, doesn't mean the same thing for everyone else.
Its not a conspiracy. There were extremely limited numbers of those items for sale, if there were 50 I'd be surprised. 50, nationwide. Then you've got to account for the fact that their web traffic probably multiplied by hundreds, if not thousands of times over their normal traffic.

Its not a scam, its not a conspiracy, but it is a lot of butthurt individuals who didn't get what they expected to get. To sum it up, get over it, Sally. Better luck next year.

 

[fallout mike]

Same here. If your website can't even handle 9500 shoppers at once you should seriously consider not having a sale like this one. That was the aggravating part. Had one in my cart trying to pay and it crashed.

 

[WestKentucky]

I had the best black friday of anybody I have heard of. Up at 615, met my best friend and hit the woods until noon. Came home with 6 treerats, and a smile on our faces. Got home and the little lady was snoring away, farted around TV/internet for a bit, ate lunch, then outside in the warm afternoon sun to put out the Christmas lights, then an awesome dinner of country fried chicken and mashed taters. Top that off with my 1 real shopping experience at the videogame shop where we may as well have robbed the place since our loot added up to 144 dollars normal price and we smoked it for just under 30.

In that tv/internet time I hit the reloading and big gun sites. Midway, grafs, buds, cheaper than dirt, and a few others...all websites slow as can be and obviously overran with shoppers. I wouldn't blame buds as much as some here seem to be, sure it was crappy, but they have so much bandwidth, and more shoppers than that allows, but what everybody needs to realize is that the Internet has obliterated all sales in basically every imaginable category other than groceries and diapers, plus each year there are more people on the planet with a higher percentage of them partaking in the ebusiness side of things. A few years ago you saw people trampled by true doorbusters...now we are whining about a site acting up. Gentlemen there is nothing to call that but progress, and the fact that Buds site failed on you is unfortunate, but nothing more.

 

[docgiggs]

Here is what I know of the BF scandal that happened at Buds.

They had ZERO items available for either pistol and a limited quantity of like 15 at the BF price for the shotgun. The items were in stock at regular price in large quantities, but only a few shotguns were set aside for the BF price.

At exactly 8am, the site "activates" the black friday tagged items. Anyone that claimed the items could be added to the cart prior to 8am is lying. The items were simply not available. The site from 7:50 on was crashing constantly and restarting. It wasn't that only some customers had a connection and others couldn't get it, the site was literally DOWN for minutes at a time. Several customers like myself got the a pistol in the cart right at 8am. To spend the next 2-3 minutes frustratingly trying to hit refresh like crazy. I ran a script hitting the site thousands of times faster than I could with my f5 key. So I know the site was DOWN and no one would be able to even access to the pages to make a purchase.

8:03am I get back in, get to the FFL page, hit skip on that and get to the payment page. I ALMOST finished checking out when I noticed the price jumped from $99 to the full $399 price. I canceled my transaction at that point which was 8:04am. I tried to go back to the main page to check what was available again. At 8:06 I was able to view the main page again. I see only the shotgun in stock. I go through the same hoops. Add it to cart to have the site crash for another 3 minutes again. Get back, select skip FFL, and go to payment screen. Which then I am informed the shotgun in my cart is OOS. This is at 8:10am.

Many people complaining didn't notice the BLATANT illegal bait and switch bit and got charged the full amount of $399 at the checkout screen for the pistols within the first 3 minutes of the start of the event. I was reading stories of people stuck for hours today trying to get full refunds from Buds who were trying to insist on a 10% cancellation fee despite doing blatantly violations of the FTC.

This wasn't a case of Buds only have a limited number of guns available and a few lucky shoppers getting it. No, this was a case of Buds having zero stock to draw people in, and sucker people into paying full price for a gun they listed at $99 in their haste to check out quickly enough before the site crashed again.

If I hadn't caught myself at the last moment I might have been calling my lawyer AGAIN for another bull excrement black friday gun deal. Sued the last time and won on the Troy debacle, and would have done it again had I actually been screwed over today like many people have been saying they were on various forums.

Then they had the gall to delete legitimate complaints about their illegal scam this day when people are just trying to get their money back. That was why they took down the ads on their facebook page and had people actively deleting posts there.

 

[N003k]

Docgiggs, where did you get the information about how many they had for sale of each item.

Also, did it possibly occur to you that running a script to refresh the site thousands of times faster than you could with F5, along with the fact that you probably weren't the only one doing so, could have been part of the contributing problem with the site going down?

 

[B!ngoFuelUSN]

Thats what im saying. Im a grownup. I understand that getting one of those items is going to be difficult. From what i have seen, NO ONE has gotten those items. It wasnt a fair deal to begin with. The fact that they deleted everything pertaining to those sales and their actions cement it for me. Will not use budsgunshop ever again

I completely support you bhhacker and am appalled but not surprised at the number who imply that you are wrong for expecting that the site would work and that it's your error in using their site on a BF.
I've built the underlying technology for the systems used at companies like BGS and the timeline stated by bhhacker doesn't fit with it just being a site overload/denial of service failure. Most often in these cases an end user loses their shopping cart. It's session over time and you have to start again. And if the pricing discount has changed, you lose that too. But in this case, after access was reacquired the cart was there but was repriced to a non-BF level. That's just disingenuous and outright cheating. Not just a systems failure. And if by some odd series of events it was an unintended error, BGS should oblige themselves to give the buyer a raincheck and deliver the product at the BF price when its available. Remember, the buyer made it all the way to the payment screen, the site went down, but when the cart came back they had taken the liberty to re-price it. Some buyers no doubt did not see the re-pricing and likely purchased. Then would have been surprised when they received the item and saw the receipt. If it was a firearm, they would be told it's 'non-returnable' and the story goes on. Unacceptable and it is NOT something that the buyer should expect.
So here is what I and other should consider. Next BF, or any time there are some good sales out there, go buy the product of your choice with a credit card, from multiple sites. If you score a few, go the the credit card company and have them cancel all of the transactions that you don't want to maintain. That is, put it back on the on-line gun shops to have to cope with a bit of power from the consumer. Do that for a while with enough people and they will realize that they will have to play straight. Or they'll get caught with unsold inventory and further site inconsistencies. In the web world, the buyer is at the further mercy of the seller more so than they are at a brick and mortar store. No one to speak with, no way of escalating, having their comments deleted and so on. But there are tools out there to turn the balance of power just a bit.
Finally, and I have absolutely no connection with these folks whatsoever other than being a customer, I have never had one issue with buying at Top Gun Supply. Maybe I've just been lucky, but they seem to play straight in every transaction I've had with them. There are a few others on my 'best of the web' list while Bud's and Cheaper than Dirt came off that list a long time ago.
GL,
B