Catch of the Day is celebrating its birthday this Wednesday, and claims to have some Nintendo Wii's up for sale at just $199!
Also up for grabs is a current gen 4GB iPod Nano for $99, a Tom Tom GPS for $99 and a Samsung DVD player for $29!
(Edited by scotty — this post is now to discuss Catch of the Day Birthday Bash 25/Oct/2008 event)
Also please help to document this event by modifying this wiki page:
you know what's sus, its loaded up and the "last catch" is samcanno who was the last catch from way back at the steam mops!
takes forever to load… no point.. wii and ipod ends soonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
I got one… .
Very poor business practice COTD, If I was running a business like that, I might as well quit, what a disgrace, hope u fail COTD
i got passed the cart, clicked on pay with paypal… and guess what…its SOLD OUT! :( :(
I got to the confirm order stage (last stage) and then it said sold out :(
Convenient, suddenly loads with like 8 mins to go.. Has taken that long that you are now logged out and by the time you login the deal is over.
camera now
For those who complain and threaten to vote negative to future CotD deals —
This is clearly an execution problem where the server cannot take the massive amount of traffic. If you plan to have 100 people coming to your party but 1,000 turned up, what should you do?!
Now, Catch of the Day is an online retailer and they are definitely not a technology shop. Scalability issue is not trivial to solve, and elastic scalability issue is even more difficult (CotD might not want to pay for the big server all the time for their everyday traffic). If you have a better idea on how they should run their online business, write to them instead of whinge here.
I'm sorry Scotty, but I disagree. They knew this traffic was coming. There is plenty of things they could have done that don't require big servers. Cloud computing is now readily available to small and medium businesses, allowing people to scale up as needed.
Have you actually set up an app on a cloud? Have you actually configured an EC2 cluster or written an Google App Engine site? Yes they are available but migrating an existing infrastructure to it is not something you can easily do with the average web devel shop you hire.
Windows Azure !!! yaya
If Cory Worthington has a house party, advertises it on MySpace and 1000 people show up is it MySpace's fault? NO. It's Cory's and in this case it's Catch of the Day's.
They can't advertise a very much desired item like the Wii at half price and expect 5 times the normal customers. This is poor planning.
There is a differences between
I am not saying that CotD is not at fault. They should have done more work in planning. However from the response in this forum, it seems that many people want to believe in (2) instead, which I do not believe is true.
this is sooooo shit….what is up now?
COTD site has been unusable for 8 hours now. Ban COTD from OzBargain please, this site is a waste of time.
it's still available but looks like gonna time out
Ive managed to get a wii, camera, dvd player and ipod now…
how in the hell you able to do that?
are you being serious?
lol, of course not!
WTF, GTFO and let others grab some bargains :)
LIES!
too good to be true
page load errors again
Camera already? How the hell did you manage that?
Huh. So I saw the Wii page with a Bite me button at literally 7:59pm. Roll over to 8pm and the site shows the pre-arranged graphic with "sold out". Rubbish.
Oh well. All of you who are threatening to take it to ACA or consumer affairs or whatever are all tools. Boo-fricken-hoo, the only regret is that CotD didn't manage to take your money from you, hence making you poorer.
Ah, I kid, I kid. It was all fun and games.
WHATS THE NEW CATCH?/
Its running alot bettr now . . Im guessing people are giving up…I just want a new tomtom now
Not running better here
I actually got past Bite Me, but my login timed out and I had to login again >_> now it's past the hour…any chance of the Wii being put up again?
COTD blows chunks!!!
PLEASE can someone try getting me a camera
I will pay you
akio… same here got to login part then took me back to camera not WII
Same, got the bite me on the wii, session had expired, went to re-login… still loading… ahh well.
awesome, negative votes are almost on par with the positive votes
I wanted that Wii so bad, this really sucks, hopefully they'll put it back up.
have clicked bite me on camera…we shall see….i am not holding my breath!
Well as others said.. Cool I found this site. Will I be buying from Catch of the Day ever. Sorry guys do not think so. Happy birthday your present. Pissed of new customers. Pissed of old Customers.. Great advertising guys…
swimmingtoad, we better see your grinning ass on ACA with all those goodies…
Currently stuck on 38% page loaded after clicking continue at checkout.
They say u can get up to 5 cameras per person but hwne I entered 2 as the quantity, it just charged me for one…hoping this transaction will go through.
I've been waiting on bite me to load, pretty much since the second the camera went up.
get to shopping cart…..TIMED OUT!
LOL slowed up completely now…
Sorry
BDAY7: Nintendo Wii Console
is sold out! :
Please remove it from the shopping cart to continue with checkout.
I've purchased over 10 items from this site, don't know if I'll bother now, given today's effort and the fact that they now use Australian Air Express who are inconveniently located at tullamarine… have to call and give leave authority, but given how they can jerk me around for 40mins trying to find a package that was sent back 2 days before my 7day collection period was up… sheesh.
what was BDAY8?? has gone from BDAY7 being the Wii to BDAY9 being the camera…WTF????
BDAY8 is the perfume that was out at 6pm.
For all you poor souls who missed out on what you wanted(me included) . You'll probably get a second chance to get that item because there will probably be people floggin their items on ebay within the next week or two. :P
in shopping cart…llloooaaadddiiiinnnggg……
Hurrah, I got a camera!
Unbelievable.
how long it take to load from the checkout?
tg786, I'll give you $100 for the ipod…
jipped. added wii to cart, checkout via paypal, then i get sent back to cotd, and product is sold out and must be removed from cart.
Pressed the confirm order button for the camera, but still waiting …
Looks like I missed out :(
Hell, make it $101, feeling generous..
BASTARDS! I clicked on bite me for the camera after it ticked over from the wii I missed… and there is a wii in my cart, but they are telling me it's sold out and I have to remove it… what a kick in the guts…. FU COTD!
tg786 how much r u going to sell it for?
I've managed got both the camera and ipod in my shopping cart.
But I don't want them. I just want Wii!!!
how much is shipping on the camera? got the cotd page up, but still waiting and waiting for the shipping page to show.
(OK, loaded, I see it was $9.95)
wowoyu, uh.. You're the problem with this whole deal.
The problem is obviously with them NOT me. I got the ipod from the OOO link above. You can still try it.
im not selling it for the same price i got it, would have to spend MY time posting it to you for nothing, never the less you can still by em at DSE for a reasonable price so send me a reasonable offer at my email and you can have it
tg786 how much r u going to sell the camera for??
telling me camera is sold out
OMG I've finally got through to shopping cart, with Wii, iPod and Camera in there >_>
But I can't get the Wii, which is what I really wanted. Parents won't let me get the other two anyway.
Tell me about it!
Sorry
BDAY9: Samsung 8.1 MegaPixel Digital Camera S860
is sold out! :
Please remove it from the shopping cart to continue with checkout
YAY HOW GOOD IS COTD :(
I didn't think you would but as I know that you just bought it for $99 I'm not prepared to make you any money on it. 4gb isn't really enough anyway to be honest.
8 was the perfume they skipped the 6pm wii and pushed it to 7pm
so dead and pissed..just when i saw the wii out i could finally log in..then after logging in the product changed to the digital camera…they have lost ALL credibility and the site is so slow…cotd…
Perhaps they should only let you purchase one item, then ban your IP? Now that would be good :)
if these are all on tomorrow in huge quantities Ill be pissed….whole day and night wasted!
camera sold out…
ehcuod
is the tom tom up next?
I AM SO MAD NOW!!! Got to confirmation and it said it didn't accept this type of credit card (my card is Visa) GRRRRRR…I didn't want to use PayPal bc i didn't want to risk getting logged out again :(
Seems like the Cameras somehow sold out…maybe server got improved now? Or all the people trying to buy Wii kicked their computers until they exploded…
Request to QQQ please put the Wiis up again! >_<
I agree, put the wii's up again!
I don't care if it costs more, $250 would be fine, still cheaper than in-store :)
COTD=Cost Of The DAY from now on…
Why dont these morons reward their existing members?
A simple form on their website that you could have filled out weeks ago.
Each person could select to enter a draw to be offered one of the items for sale (or all of the items that they were interested in).
This way some people actually get a product.
Nobody's time is wasted and COTD might actually get some repeat business.
I got the Wii page to load, never managed to get to the shopping cart.
Fookin idiots!
fancy allowing everyone 5x cameras? thats crap..so the people who got in brought up big..be on ebay next week
I know, Im Freakin p!ssed at that. I couldn't get 1 camera, but I'm sure someone got 5 >_>
i reakon they are going for the most hits on their website in a day record!
I got a Wii! ~~~ヾ(＾∇＾)
Miracles do happen!
Anyway, I agree with scotty on this. When Madman had their 10th anniversary sale their site crashed and burned too: scaling up is hard.
From what QQQ said, they already showed a lot of foresight provisioning for a 400% traffic increase. The old rule used to be that you ran at 70% utilization so you could handle spikes of 40%. It's not really their fault that it doesn't work that way anymore.
mind letting this poor lad have it? :)
I think one miracle in a day is enough. ;)
Im about to get ipod if anyone wants it…
Newbie- this page came up when I googled 'COTD' and 'rip off'. Lovin' this site!
I missed out on the wii- like the rest of you here, the page loaded but I could not get through the log in. I had the camera, but again it wouldn't let me log in and now it's sold out.
Funnily enough, I have purchased from COTD in the past and do an awful lot of online shopping. COTD's malarkey today has just cost them a whole bunch of customers, after all, some of us have far better things to do with our time than spend hours waiting for their servers to respond, just in the hope of saving a few dollars!
F#%$ you COTD
QQQ - how many wii's were sold…
Depends on how many staff are in the office today lol
Wait for their blog about what a success today was.
The thing is, they probably aren't going to lose that many customers. If someone sees something they like, for a price that they think/know is a bargain, they will probably buy it. Man if I could, I would replace the CotD homepage with a rickroll right now xD
Notice the name is singular - Catch. Suspect that means only one person gets to actually buy something for the whole 24 hours. Otherwise it would be plural - Catches.
If Mark Holden was here he wouldn't be winding his arm around screaming "Touchdown"…this would be the fat bird showing muffin top that gets the "OMG what were you thinking" comment.
The extra Ipod releases seem to have run out
Although next time you see something you like on there site. You will remember how the fucked you around this time so you will not bother trying. As really does anyone want to sit there refreshing a site for a hour as there IT is run of an old XT turbo.
Honestly I think this will hurt them.
timed out as expected.