Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Sephora Mystery Bag and the Big Black Friday Debacle

Did you stay up until midnight for Sephora's Black Friday Sale?  I'm almost embarrassed to say that I did, even though I didn't have to work the next day and thus could sleep in to make up for my very late night.  Ten dollar deals (specifically for Tarte's Lights, Camera, Lashes mascara, which is my current favorite) were too good to pass up, so I made a trip to Starbucks late Thursday afternoon and had my laptop up and running at least half an hour before midnight EST.

Now, prior to the beginning of the sale there was a fair amount of confusion over when it was actually scheduled to begin.  The flyer Sephora had been sending out via snail and e-mail listed the end of the sale in Pacific Time, but only "midnight" for the start time.  Like many others (too many, as it would turn out) I figured that midnight Eastern made the most sense, so at 10:00 pm local time I started refreshing the Sephora home page.

Nothing.  No change.  No sale banner, no link to the page where we could purchase the items.  Nothing.

I then checked the Sephora Facebook page, where people were posting left and right that they'd been purchasing their $10 deals since 11:45 Eastern, a full 15 minutes before the advertised start time.  Thankfully someone posted a link to the hidden page where one could find the deals, and I quickly clicked over and added the items I wanted (LCL mascara and a Josie Maran blush) to my cart.  Just then, the site crashed.

To make a long story very short, Sephora's site stayed down for roughly two hours.  In that time so much gnashing of teeth and venting of spleen occurred on the Facebook page that you would have thought more than cheap makeup was at stake.  Mixed in with the righteous indignation of tired and cranky would-be Black Friday shoppers were periodic comments from people who wondered why anyone could get worked up about makeup when there were starving children in their communities (fair point, but a bit ironic on a makeup store's Facebook page where presumably people come to talk about makeup and not ending world hunger) and the periodic comment from someone clueless asking when the sale was supposed to start.

Conspicuously absent from the discussion for at least the first hour of the site crash was a representative from Sephora Corporate. 

Now, I'm not one to argue that corporations inherently owe their customers anything beyond a reasonable level of customer service.  Midnight on Thanksgiving is going above and beyond, in my opinion, EXCEPT when you have a major event scheduled to start at that time.  If you don't want to make your employees work during a holiday, don't begin a large sale/promotion during said holiday.  I don't think that Sephora owed customers anything more than an apology for the crash--after all, it was up to us whether or not we wanted to stay awake past our bedtimes to purchase items--but that apology and assurances that the IT staff were working to resolve the problem needed to come sooner given the scale of the sale's promotion. 

In any case, Sephora did start offering free shipping codes and (according to them) opened up the mystery grab bag promotion sooner than scheduled to appease angry and sleep-deprived beauty shoppers.  Seeing as how I'm a makeup whore, I snagged one on Saturday when I bought another few items.  Which brings us to:


It's black!  It's pretty big!  It's full of samples!  It's THE MYSTERY BAG!


List of samples I received:
  • Clinique three-step skincare sample pack
  • L'Occitane hand cream deluxe sample (score!)
  • Clinique spot acne treatment deluxe sample (review of this coming up tomorrow--IT WORKS!)
  • Murad skin system deluxe samples
  • Dior skincare sample
  • Shisedo Pureness sample set
Not too shabby, especially as a GWP of $25 or more.  Extended reviews of all items to come in the next few days.

Did you stay up for the Sephora Black Friday sale?  What did you think of the site outage or of any of the other well-publicized site outages around Black Friday and Cyber Monday (hello, LOFT, looking at you here)?

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