SparkFun Free Day

[EricVanWyk]

Teams -

Sparkfun.com is holding their "free day" in about an hour. Basically, you get a 100$ credit on whatever, provided you order before the money runs out AND you pay shipping.

Good luck!

[Nate Smith]

And it looks like they're beefing up the site to handle it....I was in the middle of putting my cart together, and now I get a "site temporarily closed so we can upgrade things" message.

[JesseK]

Not beefy enough ...

[chris31]

The site has been flaky since last night. I had my cart all set up this morning and now the site is down. Bummer.

[Nate Smith]

They're just getting slammed with people right now....last amount I saw was that $4800 was already given away of the $100000

[Joe Ross]

Some of the twitter comments are hilarious. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Originally Posted by smartsepe

This is what #sparkfun gets for trying to use an ecommerce platform built on Arduinos!

Originally Posted by makersworkbench

@sparkfun Thermite would have been a much more efficient way of melting your servers

I just got to the cart and they are just over 10k.

[Jared Russell]

Did anyone actually manage to get all the way to checkout? I've been trying on and off since 11AM EST and have only gotten as far as the shopping cart (and it looks like they are just about at $100,000).

[Joe Ross]

I did not get through. I was getting server errors going into checkout, then had to go do work away from the computer and didn't get back until after it was done.

[EricVanWyk]

Nope

[rsisk]

So, what do you guys think. Was this a net plus or minus for Sparkfun? They became a trending topic on Twitter, lots of publicity, lots of frustration.

I think it was a net plus because of the publicity. I figure I spent a couple of hours trying to get some free stuff and it didn't work out. No worse for the experience.

Saw some comments on Twitter about never coming back to Sparkfun because of the experience, but I bet they would never have gone there anyway and were only around for the free stuff.

[Tristan Lall]

I was considering trying it when I heard about it in December...until I saw how much publicity it was getting, and the fact that it was limited to $100 000.

The fact that the site was down this morning was further confirmation that this wasn't going to end well for me. If they weren't equipped to handle the volume prior to the actual event, it was hard to imagine them pulling it off smoothly during the promotion itself (despite their mention of a new, more robust web host).

So I went to the dentist instead—that was a more productive use of $100 or so.