Dear Friends,
As you all know, recently my fans have been snapping up my batches of tools in record time. Of course, I am deeply flattered to have that kind of demand for my products and I am immensely grateful for the business! However, I hear from folks constantly who are frustrated that they have tried for ages and just cannot get a break and catch a sale in time. So, to address this concern, for smaller batches or for special batches of limited items I sometimes do a Sign Up Sale.
Well, the SUSale system certainly makes things more fair but it is often a bit tedious for me on my end. It takes a lot of time to go through the entries, discard duplicates, pick the random numbers and send out the emails. It's more work than you might think and it takes quite a bit of time. It would be nice if there was a way to simplify the process and speed it up. So I asked Jenny for assistance. She was incredibly kind to help me work out a new type of sales model and she wrote some new software to do it. (Thank you Jenny!) The result is a sort of hybrid of the SUSale and a General Release sale but with a restricted time element added. With this new sale tool I can now be both fair but also more efficient at the same time. We're calling it a Flash Sale. I think this is a cool idea and it will be rather fun as well. Now, I will continue to do both General Release Sales and SUSales, but this new idea offers us an interesting third option, especially for small batches.
How the Flash Sale model works:
1. Similarly to a Sign Up Sale, you fill out a form with your real name, real shipping address and a valid email address. It is very important that you make sure your email is spelled correctly or you will forfeit your turn! Likewise, your address must be the shipping address the item will go to. Unlike the SUSale system however, no list of entries or list of winning numbers will be shown. Remember, I'm trying to keep all this as simple as possible on my end and not so cumbersome to manage.
2. The sale will be for small batches of items, no specific quantity, it's for however many pieces I have on hand. The duration of the Flash Sale Entry Period will be however long I decide but generally these are SHORT sales for small quantities so anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes might be a typical duration of a Flash Sale Entry Period.
3. After the specified Entry Period is up I will select the winning buyer numbers via a random number generator.
4. Emails will then be sent to the buyers containing the purchase link.
5. As soon as all the email notifications have gone out I will announce on the blog that the Response Period has begun. You will then have only a short time to respond to the email and purchase the item. That time will be announced at the same time that I set up the sale. So for example, for a 30 minute sale I might give just 15 minutes to respond to my email containing the purchase link. For a 15 minute sale I might give only 10 minutes to respond. It will depend on how many items I have to offer and how long I want to run the response time.
5. If I haven't heard back from you within the given time frame (no exceptions!) then you forfeit your turn and I will select a second round of buyers from an alternate list of randomly selected numbers. The process will then repeat until all the items are sold.
This is as fair as I can make it. Everyone has the same chance. People who have software advantages or Facebook alerts and who get to the sales in the first two minutes EVERY SINGLE TIME are put on the same level playing field as everyone else. I will have more control over the sales of small batches and will eliminate the overselling and subsequent refund problem. The problem of the disappearing SUSale winners who don't get back to me for 2 days because they signed up and then went out drinking with their buddies or are scrambling around to raise the funds for the purchase is now over. There will no longer be leftovers after the sales so all batches can be more efficiently sold out and I will save many hours of answering emails after the sales. This will be a fun approach and above all, as I mentioned, it's as FAIR as fair can be for my fans! It's also fair to me and to my valuable time.
So there you have it. How about a test run? :D I'll give a little longer than 30 minutes on this first trial sale so that everyone gets a chance to read through the rules above a couple of times.
Today I have a couple dozen flat S30v Bedbugs with raw bar finish. These were sample pieces that were cut a while back and I just now finally got around to finishing them. These will run $45 plus shipping and the Flash Sale sign up link is below. The Entry cutoff will be 12:30 EST. Thanks for stopping by and I hope everyone is enjoying the glorious spring weather before the black flies come out!
Sign Up Period is over and I will send emails shortly and then announce the start of the response time. Thanks so much everyone!