Last week I received a press release from UK-based discount electronics retailer Buy It Direct.

It heralded a massive free giveaway of stock from their Huddersfield warehouse, in order to make way for new stock. That’s the story, anyway:

Buyitdirect.co.uk are holding The Great Giveaway, for one day only starting 1am Monday 4th May 2009. Thousands of high value products will be exclusively available online for FREE on a strictly first come first serve basis.

So what’s the catch? There isn’t one – buyitdirect.co.uk are expanding and need the space in the warehouse to make room for some new products. Rather than disposing of the products or sending them back to the manufacturers they decided to give Credit Crunch Consumers the chance to get their hands on some amazing products for FREE. Smeg fridges, Sony LCD TV’s, Laptops and Miele washing machines are just some of the branded products included in the promotion. The only cost the customer pays is the shipping charge of £4.95.

Staying up until 1am on a bank holiday Monday seemed a small price to pay for the possibility of bagging a bargain…

A few things didn’t sit right, though:

• At first viewing, there were only around 220 products listed, many with only one unit left in stock.
• Despite the premise that this is supposed to be a give away of old stock, an article at This Is Money suggests that the company has “also added more products to the offer to give everyone a chance of getting something.” How is that possible if this is strictly clearance?
• It felt like a hyped-up promotion simply to get attention and inbound links from major online news outlets (which they got)

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that this wasn’t primarily a marketing stunt, and in fact I don’t have a problem with that.

It’s the execution that totally sucks.

Those who registered and didn’t receive promotional codes are, ironically, the lucky ones.

• The rest of us (possibly millions?) tried desperately to access the web site with no luck. From 11pm on Sunday 3rd May (probably earlier) the web site was unreachable.
• At around 12.55am on Monday morning a “this site is experiencing heavy load, please try again in a few minutes” message appeared.
• Those who reported being able to access the site at 1am (I wasn’t one of them) said that the “good stuff” (laptops, TVs, etc) had gone within minutes.
• The company may have paid for additional bandwidth, but either this still wasn’t enough or (more likely) there was a huge bottleneck in trying to serve up pages. (Note that the site is running Windows Server 2003 and is hosted in the US)
• The FAQs said that the offer was open to anyone, not just those in the UK. That not only seems unfair but also means many more people probably tried to access the site.

When will web companies learn that they need to have infrastructure in place before trying to run these types of promotions?

“Buy It Direct” must be hoping that its reputation improves, but from what I’ve read on Twitter so far, I’m not convinced.

It’s pointless trying to appease millions of people hitting a web site and trying to purchase a couple of hundred products. Pointless.

What would have worked far better:

• Set up a simple “lucky dip” system. Given that it felt like a lottery even trying to access the site, a purely random draw would have worked better, and those who didn’t “win” anything would probably not feel so bad.
• Users would still have to visit the site to register (hence virtual footfall / linking to the site) to pick up a code and to leave their email address (marketing, see?), mailing address and credit card details (not initially charged).
• After the entry closing time, a random (automated?) draw could take place, matching each available product to a unique registration number.
• Each person is then emailed and their credit card is charged for delivery (though I’d waive that charge altogether for this kind of promotion). It’s a stipulation of entry that if you’re successful, you get what’s drawn for you and you pay. If the card is declined, another registration number is drawn instead.

Why would this work?

In a perfect, unconstrained world, the existing method chosen might seem better because you have more people browsing the site.

However, In this imperfect world (with bandwidth and server capacity constraints) very few people get a reliable, pleasing experience, which tarnishes the company’s reputation and leads to a bad taste all round. The company has to pay for tons of bandwidth, but even those who manage to view the site aren’t guaranteed to get anything. The company might get a few days worth of interest on all those £4.95 delivery charges, but that’s about the only minor monetary benefit, and even that feels rather underhanded.

Staying local

Additionally, if you are a British company, it would be much better if the promotion was only available to UK residents. I don’t have a problem with the company selling overseas, but this was a one-off promotion and it would have been better to limit the geographical scope.

Finally, on the infrastructure front, you must ensure that your server is of a decent specification and, ideally, your web hosting is based in the same country that the majority of your visitors come from. Hosting a UK-targeted site with a US ISP may make little different during normal business operations, but those extra transatlantic milliseconds all add up when the server is under strain.

Conclusions

I shudder to think how many people have been charged for delivery multiple times because they managed to get through to the order page but then the web site fell over. It doesn’t appear as if the company has a separate, robust server for handling credit card orders. Yes, they’ll get a refund (hopefully) but it’s been handled very badly indeed.

This sort of thing has happened far too many times. Companies need to assess the physical limits of their infrastructure and business before running promotions like this. Running something simpler and less server intensive would have worked far better.

Good luck to those who did manage to get the decent equipment at 1am last night. For the rest of you, I hope you didn’t spend too much of your holiday time trying to bag a bargain. Your time is more important.

Update: Just received an email from Buy It Direct:

Hi,

We’d like to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who took part in our Great Giveaway Promotion yesterday.

The response was so overwhelming that our servers struggled to keep up with demand even after some early morning tweaks from our IT guys! As a result, despite the best efforts of our support team, we know quite a few visitors experienced difficulties browsing the site and completing their orders.

Thousands of customers managed to grab a freebie and we’re now in the process of going through all the orders and allocating the stock.

Once again a huge thank you to everyone who took part. Don’t worry if you didn’t manage to managed to grab a giveaway item, there will be more special offers coming over the next few months!

Anna James
BuyitDirect

Hands up who is going to be signing up for future promotions/deals? Anyone?

Every podcast needs intros and outros, right?

It’s my composition that’s sitting there. Well, I say composition, but that’s probably a little generous. More like “stringing together some GarageBand sound effects and ’stringy’ chords”.

Anyway, it’s there. Hopefully it adds something to Dan and Duncan’s tech talk. Give it a listen.

While there’s a decent spike in followers at this point, Michael Arrington concludes:

We love these new users, but they aren’t nearly as valuable to us as the ones that we fought for in the early days of Twitter.

OK, you love them but they’re not as valuable. Quite what this definition of valuable is, I’m not clear. In any case, I can’t remember when I joined @TechCrunch but I’ve since stopped following.

For the record, anyone wanting to follow me on Twitter will be most welcome indeed, no matter how valuable you think you are. No strings or variable value assessments attached. Oh, no spammers, though.

A technology lawyer believes the BBC broke the law even thought the Corporation (which we law-abiding Brits fund to the tune of £140 each per year and rising) didn’t do it with any malicious intent.

Straun Robertson claims, “It does not matter that the emails were sent to the BBC’s own accounts and criminal intent is not necessary to establish an offence of unauthorised access to a computer,” he adds.

“The Act requires that a computer has been made to perform a function with intent to secure access to any program or data on the computer.

“Using the botnet to send an email is likely to satisfy that requirement. It also requires that the access is unauthorised - which the BBC appears to acknowledge.”

It’s interesting that security firm PrevX gave their blessing to the experiments, even though (reportedly) most security software companies won’t mess around with computers even if they are infected.

I doubt anything will happen, but remember if you live in Britain you’ve helped to fund this little experiment.

Lynx is a text-only web browser that can be easily run from a command line. There’s a version installed on a web hosting account I used so I tried it out and… disaster.

Admittedly, there’s something a little odd going on with my version of Lynx, but even so, I couldn’t log in and the actual display was hard to use. You’d think that a text-based browser for a primarily text-based service would be great, but I didn’t think so.

I tried to access the mobile version of Twitter, too, but that just tried to get me to download something, which was most odd.

No, it’s desktop clients, iPhone clients or the plain old web site in Firefox or Safari for me.

If you’re over in Chicago, take a look at this working model of a Samsung Messenger. It’s 15 feet long, 13 feet high and 3 feet deep and has been used to make free voice calls and send text messages since Wednesday.

Totally impractical, of course, but it is an official Guinness world record. It’s around until Sunday. At least no-one’s going to steal this one.

The home page can be arranged as desired and there’s localisation for such things as news, weather and TV schedules. iPlayer also fits into the mix.

While the iPhone and other handsets with larger screens and decent browsers could access the standard BBC home page, this is useful as a cut down version in areas where there’s only a 3G (or lower bandwidth) signal and no Wi-Fi.

Tried it? What do you think of it?

Two years ago, Micro Bill Systems appeared on the scene and started causing trouble. So much, in fact, that I helped set up a forum and got myself in the Guardian as a result.

A company name change (to Platte Media), some legal threats and hassles later, it does appear as if the infamous pay-for-porn company has ceased trading in the UK.

Hiwat said in an email to Michael Pollitt, the reporter who has uncovered story after story about Platte, that “Our reasons for this decision and our further intentions are simply related to our original marketing and business model.” He added: “Obviously, and just like any other business should and would do, I am making sure that stopping our marketing to the UK Market, is done in such a sensible and orderly manner, that will best preserve the interests of our customers and of our own.”

It could, however, be something to do with the Office of Fair Trading, or HM Revenue and Customs, both of whom have expressed interest in the company’s activities.

Is it too soon for celebration?

We still don’t know what Oriel, Platte’s appointed debt collection agency, will do with the “debts” it has had passed to it. We also don’t know whether Platte International will continue to run its rather dubious sites (Get Films Now, for example) in other countries. The global reach of the Internet means that access by UK computer users and minors could still be just a mouse click away.

It will also be interesting to see what Platte UK’s directors move on to. I find it hard to believe that they won’t set up another business in due course - one that could have very similar properties (and problems) as Platte and MBS had.

Watch this space.

Unfortunately this has meant that I now have a reduced workload — hopefully temporary but who can tell — with Shiny Media.

I’ve been very fortunate to have found so much regular work with them over the past three years or so, and I will continue to have input on both HDTV UK and iPhonic, but that leaves me in a place where I could use some more assignments.

Naturally, I’m not sitting around on my backside simply waiting for opportunities to plop on to my lap, but if some nice friendly editor or blog owner types were to come along and offer me some work — whether on an ongoing basis or one-off assignment — I certainly wouldn’t complain.

As well as writing on a wide variety of topics — most notably consumer electronics, HDTV, Apple products and the Internet — I am also happy to build web sites and blogs (primarily in WordPress) from a design idea.

If you’d like to find out more about me, you can contact me via this form or see me on LinkedIn or Facebook.