Sale season fails: The eCommerce bloopers our customers are trying to forget

author

Katie Leask

August 17, 2021 | 2 min read

Last Updated: Aug 17, 2021


If you never fail, you never learn. That’s why at one of our recent client clubs we asked our lovely customers about their biggest trade and merchandising bloopers ahead of this year’s sale season.

From the relatively small to the big and painful, here are some of our clients’ biggest eCommerce bloopers – anonymized, of course!

 

When offers go wrong

“Adding a £4000 shed for sale for £400…..Oops.” 

“I once set up a Gift With Purchase (GWP) with a 2p qualifying spend instead of £200.”

“My biggest blooper, of which there are many, was giving away free suits by accident! That one went down well…”

 

Website woes

“Deleting a large proportion of a website’s category navigation accidentally.”

“Updating all product names with a product description instead *head in hands*. I’ve also deleted a large proportion of the navigation before!”

“Making sale banners live on some pages when the sale was only meant to start the following week…oops.”

“We limited a product title box to a certain number of characters. I can’t remember the full, lengthy product name but it ended with ‘…cumin’. You can probably guess what it got shortened too!”

“I set up a high-profile launch for a midnight release. I got the right day but the wrong month, lots of customers thinking I was drunk.” 

 

Who needs a homepage, anyway?

“Giving someone in the team access to our eCommerce platform without checking they knew what they were doing. She deleted the homepage.”

“Not concentrating when updating the homepage and turned it all into German! Lesson learned, don’t make any big changes before coffee!” 

 

Communication ain’t key 

“Failing to mention how high-profile a certain sneaker launch was to one of our concession partners, then breaking their site on Black Friday.” 

 

Got a trading blooper to rival these ones? We’d love to hear it. Make our day by tweeting us your worst bloopers – we promise not to giggle (too much).