Amazon Cries 'Uncle' On Promotion Traffic

from the so-much-for-that-plan dept

Mon, Dec 4th 2006 12:32pm — Mike Masnick

After all that online doorbuster traffic knocked out Amazon.com on Thanksgiving day, it appears that the company is taking a lesson from many brick-and-mortar stores who learned years ago that letting everyone in at once is a bit of a problem, and learned to hand out claim tickets instead. theodp writes that Amazon's way of fixing the problem is to "change the rules to eliminate it. The e-tailer has adopted new don't-visit-us-we'll-email-you-rules to eliminate the get-an-Xbox-for-100-bucks feeding frenzies that brought the site to its knees on Thanksgiving Day and forced it to postpone last week's sale." This really is no different than just giving people in line tickets to get their item at a separate time, just that the tickets will come via email -- and it's a bit surprising Amazon didn't think of this sooner.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

9 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

a man, 4 Dec 2006 @ 1:22pm

fuck off Anonymous Coward, you're getting on my tits.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 4 Dec 2006 @ 2:11pm
  
  Re:
  huh?
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- gdwntx, 4 Dec 2006 @ 3:00pm
  
  Re:
  dude/dudett take fewer/more drugs and get a life
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Boskone, 4 Dec 2006 @ 2:08pm

Can't we all just
get along ?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 4 Dec 2006 @ 2:26pm

LOUD NOISES!!!!!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- gdwntx, 4 Dec 2006 @ 3:01pm
  
  Re:
  nice
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
discojohnson, 4 Dec 2006 @ 2:34pm

uhm, what?
ok, so they email me a link to click instead of following the one i saw on every web site. same diff. especially after someone gets the link and posts it somewhere--within minutes it's everywhere else clogging the tubes!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Samuel, 4 Dec 2006 @ 2:54pm
  
  Re: uhm, what?
  no....each claim code will, presumably, work only once, so if someone is stupid enough to bother spreading it around, far fewer people will even give it a shot than if it were open to everyone. Therefore, they will have avoided much unprofitable site traffic.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Starky, 4 Dec 2006 @ 4:54pm

Patent
Lets see if they try to patent that idea.

It would be stupid to, but seeing the state that the patent system is in now, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried and succeeded.
I would bet $100 bucks that they successfully patent it, but for the sake of our ports, I won't.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]