Rating: Accusations fly all over the place
It has the hallmarks of a special promotion which has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Online bidding site, Groupola, was promising to make 200 iPhone 4s available on July 2nd for a bargain £99 instead of £499. [See our story here]. Now several blog sites are claiming that the whole publicity stunt was a fake.
The precedent for this kind of PR disaster was set by vacuum cleaner manufacturer, Hoover, many years ago when it offered free holidays to customers and thousands of Brits tried to take advantage.
Groupola certainly claims that the “limited number” of handsets it originally offered turned out to be a quite respectable 200. The problem is … who exactly won them?
The idea was that a lucky potential iPhone 4 owner should log onto the Groupola site at 9.30 am on July 2nd and try to be one of the first through.
One GoMo News reader claimed to have never received the appropriate link but GoMo received ours. It is here and it took us to a page that says the quota has sold out.
So far so good but things start to go wrong when you look at Groupola’s Facebook page here There’s a surfer claiming to be totally independent but also adamant that Groupola has done nothing wrong.
Unfortunately, the blog bitterwallet here claims that a staff member is posing as a recipient. This is given that somone calling himself Saqib Azhar made mulitple postings on the Facebook page and then his Linkedin profile – showing that somebody called Saqib Azhar did work for the Groupola Group – suddenly disappeared.
The official Groupola news release had this to say … “The limited quantity deal sold out amidst unprecedented traffic levels as literally millions of visitors from around the world tried to access the site at once.
All handsets are now sold out and those who were lucky enough to secure the deal will be contacted in due course.
Despite having taken every step possible to ensure that the site would be able to run smoothly for this deal, the unexpected amount of people that attempted to access the website brought it to a standstill.”
Not a brilliant confession if you are posing as a threat to the likes of eBay. One GoMo News reader isn’t going to take this sitting down, of course. He’s off to the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) asa.org.uk accusing everyone right, left and centre.
It will be interesting to see how the ASA responds and how quickly it can react. Taking months in the Internet world is akin to taking years.
I tried to get onto the site and I had 3 browsers working hard for me refreshing each time each page loaded.
I was on the Groupola site since 9.20am – hoping to be able to get through – the Groupola site was non-functional at 9.20am!
This certainly felt like a scam and surely will be a mark against Groupola – I don’t think anone will trust them now!!
Have you never watched Deal of the Week on GMTV? It has lots of these deals – limited supply at £1 or 90% off without ever saying exactly how many. Urgent to buy now if you want the deal. The person that won is then talked about and the other 4,999,999 can buy a less good deal with no publicity. At least with this deal people can use the internet to answer back. Still, the company has probably gained and if flash sales weren’t profitable companies would not offer them.
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I think a full list of the winners needs to be made public and to the relevant official bodies and they need to be contacted in turn to ensure these winners were in fact bona fide lucky members of the public and not moles or plants or people affiliated with Groupola in any way…this is not a post born out of sour grapes as I didn’t even try to download, suspecting the whole thing to be a little bit questionable…I would just like to see potential dishonesty outed and punished.