So not sure about anyone else trying the Buds gun shop black friday deals. but many of us are really pissed at what they did.
Advertised a Canik and TISAS pistol both for $99 and a 12ga shotgun for $49. I figured the site would be hammered. The sale stated quantities limited until in stock supply runs out. So I'm thinking there isn't much of a chance of getting one. The number available for sale at that price wasn't mentioned, which has been a big no-no for a long time. FTC made it a law to at least list the minimum of a limited quantity sale like this in the advertisement. Which wasn't listed, but oh well.
Okay, at 10 minutes until 8am eastern, their site crashes. And continues to crash and go up and then crash again. They only have a single host with Rackspace out of Dallas. They were barely getting 10,000 concurrent users and the site was going down. The actual special sale items were not listed or clickable on the site until 8:00am EST exactly. So there was no way to add to your cart prior to that time. I managed to add a pistol to my cart right at the start of 8am, but as soon as I tried to purchase it the site went crashing down. I was refreshing constantly and get to see my cart with the $99 pistol in the cart. At this point I'm thinking YES! I got one. I start trying to check out and skip the FFL dealer selection process. Then the site does down again. I manage to get to the final check out screen 5 or 6 minutes after the start of the event and right before I purchased the pistol the price was listed at full $339 price. I was like WTF??? I almost made the purchase and from what I've read of other customers across the net the past two days, many people were charged full price for the gun because they didn't notice the price in their cart had the pistol show up as full price instead of the black friday price. Top that off, buds has a 10% cancellation fee and many people are complaining trying to get a full refund for that.
Well for me, since the pistol was gone, I tried to get back to the black friday specials page on their site. After a few minutes I get back to that page and both pistols are listed as out of stock for the $99 price, but they are both available at full price with many in stock at that price. The shotgun was showing up still as $49. I added it to my cart and went through the painful process of trying to check out while the site kept crashing and coming back up. Again I get to the final payment screen after several minutes more to be given an OOS notice on the shotgun before I can finish buying it. This was about 12-15 minutes after the start of the event.
I don't mind missing out on the deal, but I am thoroughly pissed at the blatant bait and switch tactic they pulled. From what I can tell, no one has been able to provide proof of being able to buy either pistol and only seen one screencap of the shotgun being purchased by someone on the net. Buds tried to say on their facebook page that the last shotgun was sold at 8:40 am, which was complete bullshit based on my experience with their system.
The fact they were prepared for the increased surge in traffic was annoying. The fact I didn't get the items was annoying, but not a big deal. The lack of a reservation system that is tied to available inventory when a customer adds one of the special items on sale to their cart is a massive annoyance. Still all of those were annoyances I could deal with except the fact that Buds did a blatant bait and switch in charging customers full price on an item they thought they were getting at the sale price. That is highly illegal according to the FTC. I went ahead and wrote the FTC about that episode. Not sure what will come out of that, and really don't care overall If the FTC investigates and slaps them with a fine or not doesn't really matter to me in the end, although having them hit in the face with a fine over this fiasco would be funny.
I would have been more pissed had I not caught the price switch at the last screen before making a purchase. I would be furious and hiring a lawyer over that. The lies they were doing and the trolling the company was doing afterwards also just cemented to me the decision to never do business with them again. I had purchased my Girsan and my SR22 from them previously, but those are my last purchases from them ever. Makes them on a very short black list of vendors I'll never do business with again and won't ever recommend to anyone. That list includes Dicks Sporting Goods and Cheaper Than Dirt.
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