On Friday something significant happened, thousands of women across the UK (and the US) woke up in a panic, ran to their Iphone, Blackberry, laptop, PC etc to see if they had got the golden ticket of all golden tickets- the invite to The Outnet £1 birthday sale.

The Outnet is essentially an outlet store for its more popular sister company Net-a-Porter, selling its cast off’s at a ‘discounted’ rate. Launched at the beginning of 2009 The Outnet did not quite make the impact it had hoped, failing to impress designer lovers with ‘left overs’ from previous Net-A-Porter sales, which many claim are in fact priced higher than Net-A-Porter have offered in their own sale.

But if The Outnet has failed to impress Net-A-Porter regulars they managed to bring them around with their regular Pop Up Sales, Going Going Gone Sales and product Giveaways. The Going Going Gone sale being a particularly interesting one; sort of like a reverse auction, as the sale clock starts counting the price of the one item drops until someone buys it… as you can imagine these Going, Going Gone sales do not last very long at all!

To participate in all pop up sales and offers shoppers must be pre registered with the website, and with the recent birthday sale The Outnet made it invitation only, with such an elaborate rsvp process it made the entire sale feel very exclusive. Except it wasn’t, not by a long chance; the event was highly promoted within the brands social media profiles and a print advertisement campaign was run across many of the glossy magazines.

After much hype and anticipation the sale officially launched at 7.30am and was instantly hit with problems. Many customers claim that they never received their exclusive invitation email through which you could only access the sale and of those who did many of them couldn’t get onto the website- The Outnet servers crashed within seconds of the sale launching. This is no surprise, in previous Pop Up Sales I have had to repeatedly log into my account (despite following their advice of logging in before shopping) to pay for my item. What many customers, myself included, probably found the most annoying aspect of The Outnet sale experience is, after managing to actually access the sale and getting something in your shopping bag, having the website crash just as you are paying for it and as a result you lose your item (nothing is reserved until paid for).

It is fair to say that The Outnet suffered a major case of eyes too big for their stomach. The interest and anticipation generated from a national promotion campaign coupled with a complete lack of preparation and little stock turned what should have been a brilliant event into a complete disaster. Given that the sale was by invitation only The Outnet knew how many people would visit the website and could have made the necessary preparations to avoid the website completely collapsing under the strain. Yes, stock selling out is what happens in a sale, but as one disgruntled shopper said they would have at least liked to have been given the option to see what exactly was on offer or rather sold out rather than nothing at all!

The intended 12 hour UK sale lasted about four hours before it was closed, and The Outnet have reported that at one point 9 sales were being processed every second. The aftermath of the sale was grisly to say the least… many people took to Twitter to complain bitterly about their inability to access the website, the Guardian posted an article within hours encouraging customers to leave feedback, other retailers jumped on the bandwagon enticing disgruntled Outnet customers to their own competitive sales and many shoppers accused the sale of being a complete scam.

The Outnet have stated that the sale was a success; well it was certainly a sell out and they  got their name out there, but at what cost?

Just reading the various comments posted throughout the internet it is clear that The Outnet have a bit of a making up to do.

Exactly. I was totally prepared to miss out on getting anything at all, or to not get my first choice; I’d read the “it’s a lottery” email and checked my sizes, practised my filtering, all my account details were sorted? none of it mattered as the site just took forever just to go to an error page.

Theoutnet closed pre-registration a while ago, presumably to limit numbers, but there were still probably just too many people trying to access it. Annoying since I’ve bought a ton of stuff from them before and thought the £1 sale would be a reward for loyalty!

Commenter, Guardian.

I’m fairly disgusted and won’t be buying anything from that site. Gilt it is!

American Customer on The New York Magazine

Which brings me to the moral of the story; witty ideas and fancy graphics are all fun and games but when it comes to launching any project online whether it is a new website or a pop up sale real consideration must be given to the technical requirements because without the proper support or implementation it will fall flat on its face. Using a simple example, if you opt for a flash website with long waiting times then customers simply won’t wait around they will click off and go somewhere else. Similarly, if you launch a sale but don’t accommodate for the thousands of customers expected to visit the site then the site will struggle and your customers will go somewhere else. So in terms of the whether The Outnet sale was a success or fail I think it will depend on who you talk to… for the hundreds of people who sat patiently at their computer trying to get the website to work I imagine the sale was considered a big fat fail, those who see it as a success are probably that limited number of people who were fortunate enough to buy something- a very small number compared to the many, many people left disappointed and annoyed at the entire situation.

The Outnet have since sent an email offering free delivery to those who missed out on the sale, I think it’s going to take a lot more to win around all the customers they have no doubt lost.