Amazon.com’s $100 Xbox 360 sale was great for shoppers, but not necessarily the site. It seems the promotion had so many people interested, the traffic crashed the site – the entire site.According to a piece in SeattlePI.com, the site crashed for about 15 minutes at the time the 1,000 $100 Xbox 360 units went on sale. Even with the site issues, the console sold out of 360s in 29 seconds.
What’s surprising about the whole thing is that Amazon sounds like it didn’t expect as much of a rush on the consoles. “We saw dramatically more traffic than what we anticipated," Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said Friday.
With the next-gen video game console battle about as hot as it can get, it’s hard for me to fathom the folks at Amazon didn’t “anticipate” massive interest. They were selling 1,000 360s for $100, which is about two thirds off!
And while Amazon seems shocked with the results, they didn’t come as unexpected to one blogger. “When I was at Amazon, every year we in engineering would try to avoid spikes in traffic, especially around peak holiday loads, and every year marketing folks would want to run some promotion specifically designed to create a mad frenzy on the site,” wrote Greg Linden in his blog. “Usually, we convinced them to change the promotion, but apparently engineering lost (or was asleep at the switch) this year.”
Here’s hoping Amazon is prepared for the rush that will no doubt ensue to buy its Customer Vote winner this coming week.
Related:
Xbox 360 Winning Sales Battle
Xbox 360 For $100 A Go
Xbox 360 Will Win War Analyst Predicts
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