Bud's response to Black Friday Incident
Here is Bud's response to the happenings in relation to their Black Friday deals.
First of all a big THANK YOU to all our customers and friends who are reasonable people with reasonable expectations about our recent Black Friday deals. We appreciate the confidence and trust you have placed in us and we will never do anything to jeopardize that trust. For everyone else we are going to make the following statement about our Black Friday deals and then just move on. We have attempted numerous times on numerous different forums to address the many questions, concerns, and false accusations about our Black Friday deals. It is clear that certain people are not going to let the boring truth getting into the way of a their much more exciting conspiracy theories. This final post will attempt to address the most recurring questions and concerns for anyone/everyone who cares to hear and accept the truth.
The Black Friday deals, all of them, not just the few models sold at +$200 under cost, were put together long before "Black Friday". The few models that were sold well below cost were actually set up in advance as different item numbers on the website as compared to the exact same models sold at regular price. So there were two listings for each of those guns, one at the regular price, and one at the below cost price. We did this because we wanted to be able to set the maximum quantity we could possibly sell of each of those below cost models. We actually did not pick the number of each gun to sell below cost, we simply told the marketing guys how much money we were willing to lose (=invest) on this marketing effort and let them divide that amount up between the guns being sold below cost.
The Black Friday deals were scheduled to launch at 8 am. However, I am being told that but due to the volume of people on our site/server, it was 8:04 before we were able to get all of the items turned on. The site then crashed and then proceeded to come and go over the next hour or so as our IT staff worked with our server host, Rackspace, in an effort to get us back up. By 8:46 the last of our below cost Black Friday deals, an Emperor shotgun, had sold and we were then out of all those below cost models. So every single below cost gun we had intended to sell was in fact sold....just not all in the first 30 seconds when +10,000 people hit the site at around 8 am. As many people got frustrated or impatient and got off the site, it started to come back up and some persistent people were able to get their orders confirmed. I later discovered from our IT staff that one of the major issues with customers not being able to confirm their orders was basically just greed.
The below cost deals were limited to one per customer. However, many customers were attempting to put 2 or more in their cart, and by the time their order was declined and they tried to reduce their order to only 1 gun, all of the guns were sold. Also worth noting was how many of these people were never a Buds customer before attempting to place an order for 1, or more, of these below cost guns. We had hoped these deals would go to our loyal customers who's previous business allowed us to fund these Black Friday deals, but unfortunately there was a lot of new people just creating accounts trying to cherry pick the deal. As many of our long time customers know, we have previously experienced crashes due to unexpected traffic normally caused by political or media driven events. In those cases we did make provisions to handle future incidents based on the traffic data we were able collect from those events.
Our "normal" traffic is around 1,500-2,000 people on the site, depending on the time of day. We knew we/Rackspace had the resources available to handle 2-3 times this much traffic ....just not +5 times which is what happened around 8 am and after. We have attempted to make even more provisions for "Cyber Monday" ...but honestly we cannot predict the traffic won't go much higher than +10,000 or guarantee the site won't crash again. Not asking you to like it...we just want to make sure you are aware and prepared for it this time.
We could have done nothing for Black Friday or Cyber Monday I guess ?....so nobody gets any deals and nobody gets upset ? We just thought it would be fun for our customers to have a chance at getting a gun for a ridiculously low price....and hundreds (not thousands) of customers did just that. We honestly never imagined the customers that did not get one of those Black Friday deals would get so upset they would start accusing us of all these nasty things.....scam, bait and switch, dishonest, etc. I still don't understand it myself.
I don't play the lottery but millions of people do every day. People actually have to pay for lottery tickets for a chance to win something that there is a +99% chance they will never win anything even if they pay/play every single day....but somehow that is perfectly fine ? On the other hand, we spend thousands of dollars to give everyone a free chance to win one of hundreds of these Black Friday deals on a gun....and we are the bad guy ? We don't think so. We had actually already planned to run the same program again on Cyber Monday...and we are going to proceed to do that now even with all the bad press from some folks about Black Friday. All I would like to ask is that if you are posting negatively about us and our Black Friday event ?....please just don't be a hypocrit and stay off our site Monday morning so our loyal customers can take advantage of something we only intended for them in the first place.
Posted by Rex McClanahan VP,
Did he really post it as that huge, monolithic block of text with no formatting?
