Touted as Australia’s biggest online sale, Click Frenzy very quickly became an online fail when it opened it opened its virtual doors at 7pm last night.
Despite assurances by operator, Power Retail, that the site would be capable of handling the deluge in visits without crashing, the site crashed.
As early as 20 minutes later, thousands of wanna-be Click Frenzy shoppers took to social media, letting their disappointment be known.
The twitter hashtag #clickfrenzyfail quickly circulated, while the much-hyped sale became the butt of jokes nationwide, with people using the #clickfrenzy hashtag to tweet things such as “Down down, the servers are down”.
Others were angry, tweeting “They specifically advertised this wouldn’t happen”, and “@clickfrenzy try turning your servers on and off.
Also, try not wasting our time #clickfrenzyfail”. But organisers were unapologetic for the crash, responding to the criticism on its Facebook saying
“Just like the Boxing Day sales, crowds are to be expected. For those experiencing difficulty, we recommend you check back in later when the storm has calmed enough for you to break through on your end”.
This morning the site is up and working again, with what appears to be an extended time on the clock – meaning the sale will continue beyond its 24 hour period to finish at 4:40am on Thursday, as opposed to the original finishing time of 7pm Wednesday.
But the Click Frenzy site wasn’t the only e-commerce brand to crash on Tuesday.
With the Click Frenzy site unavailable to most, shoppers took to the sites of individual retailers in order to cash in on deals, causing the crashes of Myer, Kogan, and Bing Lee, among others.
Earlier in the day David Jones’ two week old site buckled under the pressure of its one day sale across both its bricks and mortar and online stores, with the department store’s PR issuing a statement to media later in the day to announce that the site had resumed business following the outage.
David Jones was not part of the Click Frenzy sale, but instead chosen to run its own sale. Yesterday it was reported that some retailers had paid up to $30,000 in marketing fees to have their deals on the Click Frenzy homepage.
What has been your experience with Click Frenzy? (comments below)
Editors note – At the time of writing, the countdown clock was set at 18 hours remaining. An hour later at 10:40am, the clock had once again reset to show more than 20 hours remaining of the sale.
