Shopping Express announced this deal
Black Friday 3 Day Sale: N54L Microserver $199, Laptop From $199, 240GB SSD $89 @ Shopping Express
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/221366
And it got a massive 121 Votes and at the time of Writing : (13099 clicks)
In a large part due to the attractively priced : N54L Microserver $199 This drove up the votes, and traffic and wasted everyone's time. See Comments here:
As many users have reported they were registered ready and waiting to place the order at 8:00 and still the $#!#Baggy Company did not honour the deal and within 7 minutes marked it as sold out. Unless Verified Ozbargainers here can attest to the fact that they actually were able to buy the deal this is complete BOLLOCKS. They used this as advertising to offer some attractive pricing but did not have to even honor the deal as all the comments regarding this issue are on Page 3 and by this time the deal has been active with over 100+ votes for 3 days.
This is a DODGY Marketing practice and needs to be penalized severely so it serves as an example to other reps to not come here with flaky deals and lies like this. With dodgy Votes on a combined deal like this newbies are more likely to buy it thinking it is highly rated by the community but in reality the deal is not really a deal.
As a side to this there was another decent deal for the N54L Microserver whcih didn't do as well because hey Shopping Express was cheaper..
What does the community think ?
Yea if they really did use it as bait to get up voted to make the deal look like a kicker for unregistered or causal ozbargainers to be conned into thinking the other stuff is a bargain than there should be some form of repercussions.
It's bad enough when items sell out in seconds flat because there was like 3 in Stock, but to never have it even go down and mark it as sold, yea that's beyond frustrating.
If you skim the comments on the deal page, you get some crazy stuff:
"And, yes, the price stayed at $299 for the whole time, up until. 8.10pm, then it changed to $199 with "Out of stock"…"
If that is the case, Shopping Express has some explaining to do and should honor such a deal.