Retailers on failed Click Frenzy website begin discussing refunds

RETAILERS who paid up to $33,000 for an advertisement on failed Click Frenzy site have begun discussing refunds.

RETAILERS who paid up to $33,000 for an advertisement on a national shopping website that failed to launch began discussing refunds today.

Click Frenzy, which had been billed as the country’s first national online sale event, was due to open from 7pm AEDST yesterday, but instead the website hosting the bargains collapsed under the weight of more than 2 million visitors and has been available only sporadically today.

Some retailers that suffered last night even though they did not have traffic issues will be extending their sales for another 24 hours to make up for last night’s problems.

Meanwhile consumers have created witty online responses in reaction to the chaotic online sale.

Organiser Grant Arnott, from industry group Power Retail, fronted morning television shows to apologise for the outage, telling viewers the company had been unprepared for the “tsunami of traffic” that hit its website.

“What happened come 7pm, we had a couple of million users trying to query the site at the same time,’’ he told Channel 9’s Today Show. “We had geared up for 1 million users.”

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Despite Mr Arnott’s assurances that the shopping portal had returned to “full service” from 10pm last night, Click Frenzy’s website remains largely unavailable today.

A prospectus for the shopping event, leaked to news.com.au, shows the website promised retailers it had “serious hosting firepower and e-commerce capability to manage incredible traffic numbers”.

On the back of this, the group charged participating retailers up to $33,000 for a banner ad or four “premium” ads on the failed website, and $1650 for listing just one deal.

Additional advertisements cost between $6000 and $2000, plus GST.

Myer spokeswoman Jo Lynch said the department store would look into its Click Frenzy participation after the sale wrapped this evening.

"Click Frenzy still has a number of hours to go and we will review it after the event," she said.

Ms Lynch said the company had experienced its “biggest online sales day ever” despite the failure of the Click Frenzy website and congestion that prevented visitors from using Myer’s own website immediately after the event launched.

A spokeswoman for online retailer The Iconic, Catalina Romano, said the company felt “bad for customers” caught up in the Click Frenzy failure and had extended its 30 per cent off sale by a further day to compensate them.

She said the firm would launch discussions with Click Frenzy today about recouping their investment.

Click Frenzy

“We’re definitely going to look at it,’’ she said. “This could have damaged our brand as well. There’s a conversation to be had this morning between our media guys and Click Frenzy.’’

Kogan founder Ruslan Kogan said the company agreed to participate in Click Frenzy early but rebuffed the organiser’s later demands for “thousands of dollars” to be part of the event.

“I feel sorry for retailers who did pay them,’’ Mr Kogan said. “Every single retail who paid them for a listing will be disappointed. It’s like paying to advertise in the Daily Telegraph and then the Daily Telegraph deciding not to print the newspaper that day.”

Mr Kogan questioned whether the event would continue next year after this year’s high-profile failure.

“Why do you need to pay someone to advertise bargains? It’s not like they’re Google and they’re getting 10 million visitors a day,” he said.

This Facebook page is one of many that have popped up following the failed launch last night of Click Frenzy.

Click Frenzy web hosts Ultra Serve said via Twitter that the portal had “huge volumes of traffic as expected” at launch and also claimed the site was “working great” in response to complaints.

But OrionVM managing director Sheng Yeo said the Sydney servers had clearly been overwhelmed and it was “obvious that traffic far exceeded expectation”.

He said the surge in visitors had created something of a denial-of-service attack for the website but that the company should have done better “load testing” before the site launched and prepared for extra visitors.

Despite the Click Frenzy website outage, many online retailers reported high sales for the event.

Kogan hosted more than 200,000 unique visitors yesterday, The Iconic reported “record sales” and retailers not associated with the event also received extra visitors. Daily deals website Catch of the Day reported 1.5 million visitors to its site in the 24-hour period.

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