Bruery Allocations

Good to know - thanks for the info!

 

I spent two hours swearing at the website this morning while hitting F5, left at noon to race up to SF to snag a bottle of West Ashley since I missed the release last weekend, and when I got back at 1:30 I bought three bottles of BT in less than a minute. It was a strange mix of emotions at the end of that journey.

 

Maybe if they didn't promote the cr@p out of this sale, for 2 weeks prior via every social media outlet possible, things might run smoother. It's BT it will sell out.

 

Why wouldn't they promote the hell out of the beer? Sure, the crash and lag was unexpected but the goal, which is to get their name out there as well as make profits succeeded. I'm curious what you would have done differently in terms of promotion. This thread has us talking about it and bitching but realistically, Bruery and Co. are laughing their asses to the bank and I don't blame them one bit. That's just the way the cookie crumbles, despite how we as consumers think it should be run.

In the end, it's their business and it's their decision to do what they want to do with their products. If you didn't like the wait, pay your dues to the society and get allocations. If you don't want to do that, then you can always walk away and go on with your day. That's the beauty of capitalism.

 

You're right that it's their business, but it's just plain bad business strategy as it destroys the goodwill of the company's most loyal customers, frustrates the company's potential new customer(s), and taints the company's reputation overall.

 

Bad business strategy? U mean selling a product online DTC in 2013 is bad business strategy? These guys are at least attempting to join the 21st century, which is far more than I can say for all of the other sheep breweries who refuse to do the same. Granted their site sucks, but I got my beers so really its water under the bridge. If you dont like it, dont buy.

 

No it wasn't. Even the Bruery's promotional emails had a pseudo-disclaimer saying that the site would slow down and with "a bit of patience" it should work. Maybe they didn't realize how badly it would break, but they knew it wasn't going to be smooth.

 

In a realistic market, you would be absolutely correct. However, craft beer geeks have shown time and time again that they're willing to get shat upon and ask for another serving.

In 2010, by the time Lost Abbey had released a string of flat and infected special releases (not to mention shoddy QC on certain shelf beers) at pricepoints that were near the top of the market, you'd think they would've destroyed their goodwill with their loyal customers, right?

After Alpine released multiple infected barrel aged beers, a horrendous excuse for a sour, and had ongoing QC problems on their normal beers, people surely wouldn't line up in droves to buy the next limited release from them, would they?

Those are just two examples of breweries that had ongoing problems, and in both cases weren't even apologetic about it. Tomme told us that AS was supposed to be flat like a fine wine. Pat told us that we should've stored our BA Token in the fridge as if that mitigates an infection. By any reasonable standard, there would've been considerable fallout, and while you might be able to argue that Lost Abbey's beers sit on shelves at times, that has more to do with price than the goodwill they destroyed.

As long as craft beer geeks continue to fall all over themselves chasing every limited release, breweries only need to get it right most of the time, because they know the fallout from their failures will be excused and forgotten.

 

I was referring to the severity of the crash. To believe that they thought it was gonna be completely smooth was unfounded. Bigger websites have had bigger issues and as we've seen time and time again, this isn't an uncommon occurance, especially with such a big name like BT. You can only prepare so much for this type of situation. Would they have done it differently had they known what they know now? I think they would.

 

I'm not trying to crucify them, but I don't understand how anyone didn't see this coming. The stress test a week before crashed pretty hard, and that was obviously a smaller amount of traffic than what BT would be. I realize that there's a very limited amount of things you can do in the span of a week, especially since you can't do another stress test (and their internal testing obviously didn't properly simulate real usage), but it was plainly obvious that it was going to be very slow and very painful. Did they expect a half hour of pain instead of two hours of pain? Maybe, I don't know.

Either way, they've shown that their existing e-commerce platform works fine for managing the societies, but isn't a good fit for high traffic sales. I'm sure they'd like a unified platform to cover all of their needs, but I don't think they're going to find a cost-effective solution with the path they've been taking. I can only assess it from the outside looking in, but between the number of plugins and images on the page, and the latency in adding products to the cart without any load on the site, it's pretty clear that neither the code nor the technology stack are optimized to scale the way a BT-level sale needs to scale.

I'm curious to see what they come up with next, but they'd be better off either re-thinking the BT sales model, or using a different platform for BT. Their current provider doesn't seem to be guiding them down the right path for high traffic sales, and I hope they don't follow bad advice and keep throwing money at a sub-optimal solution.

 

What really threw me for a loop was why I had to pick quantity and add to cart on one page, choose my method of shipment on another, got to yet another page to input my contact information, go to another for payment information, submit that, then another to confirm all information, and another still to process the order. I mean...holy shit. Can that NOT all be done in two goes?

My shipping info and everything should be stored on site. I should log in, add product to cart, check out, all of my info should pop up, and I should confirm order. Done. You're in, you're out. I've stood in lines at in person releases that took a fraction of the time to move through a line than it took to check out online yesterday. I'll bet I got no fewer than 9 unique error messages in the process of refreshing and otherwise trying to navigate the process.

I'd stop with the stress testing, blow the site the hell up, and start from scratch. Build something from the ground up that you know needs to withstand a brutal amount of simultaneous traffic. Or...leave your site alone and use someone like Brown Paper Tickets for this stuff.

I've done numerous online sales for AleSmith that they've run through that site, and I can't explain in words how simple it's been to procure product and check out when they've had sales.

 

They need a check-out system that is similar to Amazon's.

Product: add to cart > Check out > Confirm order

Even with my info saved on their site, I still had 5 different screens to get through. 2-3 less screens to get through would be awesome.

 

That's the thing, it's not a brutal amount of simultaneous traffic. The amount of traffic they're getting is paltry compared to even small online retail businesses. Whoever is providing their e-commerce site are way out of their league and they do need to move on.

 

I bought a full allocation, and 3 more yesterday. Because, you know, crack-in-a-bottle and all that.

 

I did that last year, and I still have a few bottles left. Add in CR, M3, Bois and Grey Monday and I've got enough high alcohol brewery beers to last me a while.

 

$39.99 for Grey Monday?!?!

 

Those must be some pricey hazelnuts...but who are we kidding, we are all maxing out anyway.

 

Same price as Chocolate Rain so it's not surprising.

 

Did anyone seriously think Grey Monday would be less than Chocolate Rain? And if so, uh, why?

 

I'll be maxing on everything this time. Fuck me. And probably end of the year, too. Wish there had been some shitty beers like Praecocia in there the rest of the year that I could skip.