Frustrating Black Friday experience

<div> It really was a terrible experience for me as a first time shopper at OneDayOnly.

I ordered the Nouvelle cast Iron set in the misty teal colour as well as the diamond dot painting 40x50cm Windmill. Upon check-out, I’ve selected payment option as Credit Card and even got to approve the payment on my banking app, however your servers could not be contacted all of a sudden and therefore the payment did not reach you. I received emails around this, stating that my order is still in my cart and that I should follow the link in the mail to conclude payment, I have tried multiple times yesterday to complete the payment through trying different mechanisms, i.e through the link on the email, phone web, laptop web and even tried getting this done using the app; failed every time.

Further to this, I also tried adding the -100% patio set to the value of R20,000 (which was available still) on numerous occasions to my cart on the app, it continued giving me weird errors and yet it shows as available?

Eventually I managed to get onto the site around 17:00; I immediately looked for the cast iron set and the Diamond dot painting as my cart was emptied out. Needless to say, both were sold out as well as the patio set which was no longer available. Then I still get an email stating that my order has been canceled because you haven’t received payment and yet the items aren’t even available anymore?

This is truly disappointing to say the least.

1. Where were the backup servers (i.e. Disaster Recovery servers) 2. What happened to stakeholder management and managing expectations? I feel you can really improve in this area; as soon as servers went down, generate the comms to let clients know the current situation and provide possible ETA on resolution? Your main focus should be around client centricity. 3. Using historic Black Friday data, and looking at the trend around % increase of concurrent users over the years, surely your performance and load improvements should be your highest priority as this seems to be lacking significantly. 4. It gives a false sense of current state of things if you are still able to access the app and it shows you are still able to shop? Why not then “shut the app down” (if that can be done) or at least send comms to clients stating that servers can’t be reached, therefore shopping on the app is also not possible, and also proving an ETA in this regard? 5. How do you plan on going about gaining trust in your clients who have undergone these frustrating and disappointing experiences?

I truly hope that some improvement measures are currently underway, ramping up to Cyber Monday. Hopefully the experience would not be as horrible as it was with Black Friday.

Looking forward to your response.</div>