3p dresses and angry customers

Here’s a lesson for any company using social media as a marketing tool, if ever there was one.

Goddiva, an online retailer, decided to hold a flash sale today to celebrate its third birthday, offering about 18 dresses for 3p each. Yep seriously, 3p! News of this spread like wildfire and, of course, when it came to the sale going live, the website crashed.

Even when people were finally able to get onto the site, most didn’t succeed in buying a dress before the site crashed again.

Plenty of people have since taken to Facebook to complain. One user, Laura Caroline Emery, wrote: “Goddiva, I think the sale should be on all day, I haven’t been able to get on your site for more than five minutes, it’s really unfair on everyone who missed out. I couldn’t explore the dresses as every time I did the next page said that your site was down for maintenance!

“You should have known a sale like this would be hard on your servers, but saying any dresses after 2.30pm aren’t counted – not very fair at all! It’s a disgrace! You wouldn’t turn people away from the till in a shop if a sale was on.”

There are far worse comments on the social networking site, although some users also defended the company. And, it looks like Goddiva is honouring at least some of the 3p dresses which made it into consumer’s shopping baskets before the sale ended at 2.30pm.

I’ve tried contracting Goddiva for a comment, but no one has replied yet.