After that massive fail back last year, the guys over at ClickFrenzy have not given up their attempt to make an Australian equivalent of the US online shopping phenomenon known as “Cyber Monday”. Those who were lazy not to unsubscribe from their mailing list – me included – have been told that the next ClickFrenzy will be on November 19.
And no one cared.
For those who need a refresher, ClickFrenzy launched last year with a lot of publicity. However, on the day, the site crashed and many of the sites that were involved in ClickFrenzy – including Myer and Kogan – became unavailable as they were unable to cope with the huge surge in traffic. Also it didn’t help when they posted this on their Facebook wall during the first few hours:
Whilst some individuals are having issues battling against thousands of other shoppers, thousands (yes, THOUSANDS) are online, and successfully nabbing bargains with Click Frenzy… And clearly that couldn’t happen if the site was done
This year, however, they say they are able to handle it. On their About page, they said that they have fixed the problems that caused last year’s downtime: “We’ve listened, we’ve learned and we have been working extremely hard to put right any wrongs. For 2013, we have a massive calendar of exciting events in store, driven by the demand from you, our loyal customers and participating retailers.”
However, looking at the retailer list for this year’s ClickFrenzy, it is considerably light of smaller online retailers. That’s no surprise, given they were effectively hurt by the site-being-inaccessible-and-losing-a-sale problem of the first ClickFrenzy. But some of the big names are also not part of this year’s ClickFrenzy – with names including Kogan, Dick Smith, Target, David Jones, and Harvey Norman.
Out of all the major retailers, Myer, Woolworths and Big W are the only ones participating in this year’s ClickFrenzy. On the list this year include Mwave, Ted’s Cameras, Lenovo, EzyDVD, Dell, Bookworld, and a lot of the fashion outlets like The Iconic and Yd.
But the main problem with ClickFrenzy – in my opinion – isn’t the retailers. My problem with the first one was that there weren’t a lot of good deals. Many of the deals were terrible, – especially considering I could probably get the product for less in America during the first ClickFrenzy (the Australian dollar was above parity at that time). Heck, if I wanted to, I could have just taken advantage of the Cyber Monday deals in America and have them shipped to me in Australia (directly or through a US mail redirection service).
I’ll keep an eye out on any deals – but if it’s like last year on the deals front, then ClickFrenzy has failed again. You cannot claim to be a “Cyber Monday” equivalent if your deals are just total sh*t.