Future Shop Drops Ball
December 27, 2006 by Mark Evans
Filed under Business
According to Mark Goldberg, Future Shop was a victim of its own e-commerce success before Christmas. Goldberg said a sale featuring Boxing Day prices was so popular, many people got this message:
“The request cannot be processed at this time. The amount of traffic exceeds the Web site’s configured capacity.”
Can you imagine how many people were disappointed with Future Shop and the e-commerce experience? When people wonder why e-commerce hasn’t taken off in Canada like it has in the U.S., customer service is a key factor.
Technorati Tags: Canada, e-commerce
Future Shop/Best Buy has had server related problems during the launch of every Boxing Day sale in recent memory.
However, they did do a lot of things right. For instance, they provided the community on my site (RedFlagDeals.com)with the flyers for the Boxing Day sale well in advance of the street date and when their servers were having problems, they were on our forums providing tips and status updates.
I think FS/BB is doing a pretty good job. Remember that even Amazon.com has had issues handling load during Black Friday (the rough US equivalent to Boxing Day).
On the 24th, I did manage to get what I wanted to buy on Futureshop.ca but it took my 30 minutes to go through the whole process… Pain…fulllll…
I also blogged about my FutureShop.ca experience when the Nintendo Wii launched… Same difference.