Changing the Flash Sale
Novica
Posts: 23,925
in The Commons
Seriously- ending a flash sale at 5:15pm? Talk about inconsistency. The people getting off work don't even get to shop the one you pulled.
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But it wasn't 5:15 for eveyone. It's late evening here, morning in some parts of the world.
Even worse. When people complain that they missed the sale that lasted just a few hours, it should make people sit up and realize they're losing sales. This was a person who was ready to buy. There is validity in giving urgency to sales, but it doesn't work when the sale is so short only some customers are awake to take advantage of it. Daz leaves a lot of money on the table.
(Responding to Chohole) Very true. But I don't care what time it is, it's about consistency. Nothing new though, is it? Daz often has sales, so all of it will come back around sooner or later. And if not, it's lost revenue for them, and money in my pocket.
That logic is flawed IMO. Seeing as the sales don't run for 24 hours, there are always going to be users that want to buy and are not going to be able to participate. bascially you have to have the sales run till everyone gets a chance to buy or stop having them, I vote for the sales. Besides, with the sheer amount of sales DAZ has, it all comes around eventually, no need to get worked up over missing one.
Is it so difficult to have each sale last 24 hours - to give everybody in the world a chance to shop? It's extremely annoying and frustrating to put items I want to buy into the shopping cart and then when I go to pay for them, having the sale be over. It's a huge waste of time, and I'm begining to resent it.
We are living in age when a lot of people look at your site on their mobile device - while they're standing in a moving bus, or on a 10 minute break at work - and it's not always possible to browse through hundreds of items, or going through the process of paying with PayPal.
If you're going to have time limited sales then at least have the courtesy to post the time the sale will be over.
hardly flawed logic that most people understand the concept of limited time sales, but rthey expect fairness. If the sale doesn't allow half the world to participate, then customers feel like they're getting screwed. Hence threads like this one.
Sales are supposed to drive sales, not turn them away. Apparently, some people at Daz haven't gotten that memo yet.
Honestly, I'm wondering if maybe they didn't intend to put the G2F stuff on sale just yet. It was this little short blip of a sale -- I put something into the cart when I was elsewhere, got home an hour later and it was over ... mostly. Meanwhile, the G2M sales started during the end of the other sales, and they're still going, hours and hours later. Seems pretty clear that those sales will run until probably midnight Mountain time. (Apart from anything else, I can't imagine any personnel, given with the current crisis, suddenly looking up and thinking, "Oh crap! We let that flash sale run three hours too long! Gotta kill that now!")
I think it's both the predictability, combined with the periodic lack of it, that is so crazy-making. The ones they call "flash sales" have, for the past few months, generally lasted 24 hours. They've got the new "blink" sales, which are weirdly random, but at least that's what they're clearly meant to be. When something labels itself a "flash sale" but acts like a new "blink" sale, it's offputting and irritating.
Managing sales is part of Magento, and I thought a main reason for over to that platform was to give them the flexibility for all of this. No human is necessary to start and stop a sale.
I fully appreciate the reasons for having sales, including short lived ones. But sales are meant to make more money, not lose it. I don't use Magento on a daily basis, and I'm sure Daz's installation is highly customized. But surely there is a plugin that allows for customers to complete a sale of items already in their shopping cart, as long as those items have been added during the last hour or two. No one is trying to cheat the system here. Some customers may be needing extra time to move funds over. Or answer the phone.
Except for very rare events, all sales should be no less than 24 hours. And for the most part they are. I chalk the exceptions to errors in Magento or pilot error or both. I'm less keen on the non-transparent tactics Daz uses, such as no stated end dates/times for nearly all sales (sometimes they say "today only"), cynical gimmicks like blink sales, intentionally obtuse sales qualifications (I mean, is this Publisher's Clearing House?), or the real winner, suddenly upping the price between the time an item is added to the cart, and checkout.
I love that new expression forum users have come up with- Blink Sales. Sad, isn't it, for it to be necessary?
I'll be honest, the thing which made me feel bad, was I did a writeup for other folks on my art studio thread to show them some of the products I thought were neat, so I steered a few people to products that suddenly weren't available for FLash Sale. Getting my expectations thrown out the window is one thing, but sheesh, I felt irritated at what felt like "leading people on." I know folks weren't upset with me, but it left a sad feeling for me and didn't need that on a Friday night. It was literally only a few minutes after I posted, that the sale went poof. Great timing.
Er ... that's not a forum-created expression. That's what DAZ actually calls them on the scrolling banner -- there's a huge BLINK SALE logo on the image for whatever it's a sale of. They generally seem to last 2-4 hours or thereabout. DAZ had them periodically during the period between Bethany and Karen. (Every time I saw that logo, all I could think of was David Tennant saying, "Don't blink. Don't Blink. Do Not Blink." And then, of course, you blink and are sucked by evil stone angels into another time.)
And really weirdly apropos to this discussion, the new sale for Saturday -- which so far is nothing more than the eternal swirlies of doom -- is called "Gateway to the Flash Sales." The name fills me with terror. TERROR, do you hear!?
LOL, well, blink and your terror will be gone
I agree totally to having the flash sales post the time the flash sales ends. I too had put items in the shopping cart, but when i clicked on check-out the falsh sale had ended. Had i known that the flash sale ended 3 minutes after i entered the site, i would have picked the items from my wish list on the first and maybe second page, and then completed the check-out. And it is not the first time the sale has ended before i could check-out the items, once i didn't realize it was ended until after i had bought it at full price.
Which flash sales are you talking about? I have seen no flash sales since I do not live in the USA. Perhaps that they are for US customers only? Well I do not appreciate the way DAZ is running it's business these days...
I will thus answer here what was typed in the message that I got in my account today: no, I did not enjoy the sales that you have rolled out for "us" (not for me apparently...) today (unless "today" was in fact my "yesterday"!) since I have seen none...
Thank you DAZ!
They are all gone now.
So no it wasn't a U.S. only thing.
It was just a messed up thing. :P
DAZ's site has become NSFW for a while now. I wish there was a way to get onsite notifications when items I have wishlisted are on sale. This way, I can at least try to snag somethinhg on my iphone.
The blink sales are particularly difficult.
Well, my product library is complete I think and I just have downloaded and installed products with the DIM (older products I already had to download), so until now no problem. Do not know how it would be if I would buy something right now.
Rendo does/did this. But usually, they rotate things to sale too slowly, and by the time the item from my wishlist went on sale, I had lost interest, or I had found something else.
This is one of the downsides of training customers toward steep sales, rather than having natural market prices. You have to make room for those 75% off sales, and the only way to do it is to jack up the regular price well above market. Only the most impatient buy at that price, so you have another sale, this time at 78%, because you're training customers -- the Pavlovian dogs that we are -- to respond only to discounts. So you raise list prices on new items to compensate, and the cycle starts all over again. Slope slippery, this way comes.
That's not what I remember from way back immediately after the switchover from the old store. There were a lot of comments here in the forums about various differences in the way everything now worked, and we were told "Magento doesn't allow us to do it like that any more". I know a lot of the old sales and other events had to be manually nursed along, and a lot of the new ones also end up needing a manual swift kick in the database. Sometimes I wonder which needed the most intervention...
The previous store was all-custom, and Magento out-of-the-box may have been more limited. But there's virtually no restriction on what they can do with their own installation of Magento if they have the programming staff for it. By this time, I imagine Daz's Magento is far from a stock version. Magento supports cron jobs, which are timed automated cues to perform some action, which could include putting a new carousel banner into rotation, marking a URL (for the promotion) as public, and setting the price and other rules of a list of products. There's no technical reason promotions can't be handled automatically, but whether Daz does it this way, only they know.
In any case, the point is, Daz could have a cron job that rolls the flash sales over 24 hours after whenever they began, should they not want to always make it midnight mountain time. Consistency is why we use computers, after all.