Amazon.com’s Customers Vote
December 3, 2006
So, Amazon.com is doing a 4 week promotion called Customer’s Vote. Basically, they put 4 great deals up for a vote and they let visitors vote to see which one they offer. They offer a certain number of the winning item at the price mentioned and then they offer “runner up” deals on the other 3 items – basically, deals that are good but not as great as if that item had won.
The first week, the winner was an Xbox 360 basic system for $100. I tried to get it, getting there 10 minutes before and refreshing over and over again. At the time it was supposed to go up, it went unresponsive on me. Like 8-10 minutes later, it started working again and the deal was over. I didn’t get any of the runner up deals because I didn’t know they were offered, plus I didn’t want any of them.
This week, the winner was the Axion AXN6070A 7″ Portable DVD Player. Regularly up for sale at $99.99, the deal price was $25.00. I arrived 10 minutes early (edit: not late) again and waited to refresh until it got to be a few minutes away, refreshing every 30 seconds or so. Once it was time, I refreshed and waited 10-15 seconds and… the get deal button appeared! I clicked it, passed the captcha thingy and I got the deal. Not as great as an Xbox 360, but I’ll take it!
So, I’m happy. hehe
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If they made a deal like that on a 360 I’d be refreshing like crazy also. :P
Glad to see you got that for that price. Lucky. :)
I got to AMZ 1 hour early, loaded the page and waited. I refreshed about once every 10 minutes. and 1 minute till and right on time. I saw the add to cart thingy, did that, and the page failed to load. Refreshed and saw they catpcha thing entered it and the page failed to load. Finally got through and they were all sold! In less that 45 seconds!
Glad you got through Patrick. I still think amazon needs to update the system when they do stuff like this to give everyone a fair shot. I had at least 5 failed page loads during the process which obviously cost me time. I didn’t even get to see the Xbox "buy now" button it was so busy.
It was still fun to try and I’m glad someone I know actually got through!
Ouch. Sorry man. Yeah, in these deals, it’s gonna go out super fast, no matter what they do.
And yeah, I didn’t even see the buy now button on the Xbox one, either. The site just stopped loading. :)
They’ve changed it this time due to massive complaints about the load. This time, 1000 random VOTERS will get a chance at the deal and you’ll get a huge window to make your purchase. I missed the darn vote, but this system seems a little bit more fair.
Yeah, I noticed that. Sorry you missed the vote. I’m not sure what I think of it. I guess it will make people relax a bit more, though. Some people were going insane (looking at deals forums, Amazon.com’s forums, etc.). Natural, I guess.