Its a conspiracy I tell ya ... Amazon UK Black Friday sales are rubbish

Amazon sites are having the annual Black Friday sales now at the US and UK sites (if you do not know what BF Sales are click here). While both sites are supposedly run by the same company, the sales practices are entirely different.

What happens is selected items are put on offer for a limited time and limited quantity only. Its a first come first served scenario ... but at Amazon UK, it seems to be more like a blackhole scenario instead. Items will go on sale and right in front of your eyes, the [Add to cart] button changes to sold out in mere milliseconds!! Many people have complained but to no avail.

The first items on sale were CDs by Take That and Susan Boyle. Amazon UK claims that 1000s of CDs of each were sold. Hmmmm .... taking into account the population of UK/Europe and the number of fans that Boyle or TT has, I don't think the 2000 "reported" stock was sold out in 2 seconds?!?! Come on people, how many actually WANT to buy that Boyle CD? Not that she's a bad singer but it can't be that high demand ... maybe if it was Beyonce, or Shakira .....

Amazon US seems to be handling things more fairly. You see a waiting queue and get to join a waitlist if the item is already sold out. There may be instances where a person cancels their order and then it is passed on the the wait list for the next customer to grab. This is better sales practise and will keep a customer happy because they are treated fairly (or so it seems in comparison to the f*cky UK site)

Anyways, customers have started figuring out they can get better deals for some items without having to do the mouse button mashing when the timer dings. There are several good deals though (the Harry Potter 1-6 6 bluray movie collection at £12.97 was a steal ... that equates to around RM64.20 but unfortunately Region B blurays won't work here ... *sigh*). As I post this, the 37" LCD TV just went on sale like 6 seconds ago ... but then so did the response time of the site 'cos all I'm getting is that blasted spinning loading symbol as Amazon UK slows down to a crawl....

UPDATE: one minute later, all the TVs and toolkits are now sold out. Go figure :P