Saturday at 12PM EST chaos erupted upon the servers of Adidas.com for the first online release of the Adidas Yeezy Boost. Everything that you figured would happen with a release of this magnitude happened. The site crashed, it took hours for orders to get through and thousands were left empty handed. Business as usual you might say, that is, unless you experienced it. While Adidas’s system clearly wasn’t set up for the amount of traffic it experienced on Saturday that really wasn’t what left many waiving their fingers in anger. No, what did however, was the ZERO communication on Adidas’s part via social media as to what was going on (it was as if we took a time travel back 10 years to the days of the Laser IV release). Were they working on the site? Were they sold out? Are dudes over here trolling on the forums? If you avoided the online chaos lets give you a play by play of the typical experience.
Twelve PM hit you were already logged in and had added your size to cart, BOOM! Oh wait. According to Adidas they were “out training, back soon, stronger than ever.”
Ok, cool they crashed, we’ll keep trying…………………..for the next 3.5 hours. At some point if you were persistent you had the shoes in your cart and were taken to the check out, YES!
Oh wait. Seems Adidas is “out training again.” Ok, after another 30 minutes you are finally able to get into Paypal to pay for these shoes and claim victory to the world. CLICK, Pay! Processing, processing, processing, processing
BOOM! I’m good right?! Bap! Wrong. They apparently don’t have the number available in my cart (1 pair) yet their site clearly states “available”. To make matters worse, over the next hour or two while orders are resubmitted the status of the size goes from “available” to “only 5 left”. Ten minutes later “only 3 left”. How could this be? How could there be none available in a quantity of ONE yet the system clearly shows stock available over the next hour or so? System problems? Maybe (although this particular problem is not excusable for a billion dollar company). Still, lets forget that. Eventually, (if you were late to the game) Adidas posted a photo of the Yeezy Boost with “sold out” on it. Fine you think, that is, unless you were already able to get through. See, if you were already able to get into the page you would assume that since that photo wasn’t showing up on your screen that you still had a chance to purchase them. Also, chances might be, that you were to busy trying to buy a pair only to slowly see every size over the next 10-15 minutes disappear. To summarize, a complete mess.
Still, all would have been forgiven had Adidas tweeted out a few updates to let people know what was going on (as is common with other brands) but nothing. No, instead individuals trying to secure a pair wasted 3+ hours of their life trying to buy a shoe that will eventually hit stores in the weeks to come. Word of advice for Adidas: Having people go nuts for product and basically competing with each other is good business (even though people hate it but secretly love it), especially in this day of hype. Eventually however, it gets annoying and will turn off customers (there has to be some peace in all the chaos ). Systems crash, things can go wrong we all get that but please do not leave customers in the dark with no social (text, twitter, IG etc.) communication especially when companies have no problem bombarding timelines with tons of useless content.
Sincerly,
The sneaker community.