As an ASOS Premier customer, I tend to receive a lot of emails from the online fashion giant, and I must admit I usually delete them after reading the subject line.
However yesterday I was excited to read that all customers were getting 20% off everything, until Monday noon today.
I waited until yesterday evening when I had a bit of time to sit infront of the TV on my laptop and do some shopping. Unfortunately the site was obviously experiencing a lot of traffic as it was very slow and kept crashing. I decided to leave it a few more hours to do my shopping.
Later last night, around 10.30pm, I decided to continue to get the brilliant deal however as soon as I had everything in my basket and had entered the code the site told me that the promotion was no longer valid. I checked ASOS’s Twitter and Facebook Page only to see the message that the deal had been abandoned.
*Sobs* ?? I’m not sure that’s the best approach to communicate with thousands of angry online shoppers, do you?
Luckily, I noticed an older promo code being passed around in social media so used this to get my discount but I did think about those that wouldn’t have thought to check Facebook and Twitter. I would have been very angry had I not managed to use the older promo code!
Looking at the tweets and messages they have been sending their customers, they are quite abrupt and not that sympathetic.
This is seriously damaging to ASOS, who have a huge community of loyal fans. I have been using the site for many years (since it was called ‘As Seen on Screen’ !) and this has made me think twice about their values.
It will be interesting to see how they propose to make it up to their fans.
It goes to show that they don’t monitor their servers load that closely or their customer behaviour or you would have thought that they would have tested their infrastructure before adding such a discount to ensure that they could cope with the demand. It’s not the first, nor will it be the last, time this happens, but it’s certainly one of the bigger brands in recent memory.
I’ve seen smaller companies have the same problem in the past and ending up blaming their customers for not trying to access the service earlier or for adding load so that the discounts / offers / limited time events expire.
One of the worst offenders for not having spent the money on infrastructure / architecture to deal with demand are, of course, the ticket vendors. How many times have people found themselves on websites trying to book tickets for an event when they go on sale only for the servers to crash? The companies know the demand is there and they know exactly when the demand would hit, so it’s now very feasible for them to have designed a platform so they could “spin up” some more instances of whatever is causing the bottle neck or add more nodes into database clusters and then kill them when demand reduces.
well, they gave me a promo code to use up until the 28th and still get 20 percent off