Lee Valley website crashes under the strain of Cyber Monday

[Malcolm Schweizer]

Thank you, Rob. I figured I was asking a bit much, and appreciate your response. Well I am certainly appreciative of the deals. I actually save up during the year and this is one of my favorite splurges. As I said before, I have yet to find a blemish on the so-called blemish tools- as testament to your high standards.

Oh, by the way, I got my shipping amount confirmation email notice at 6:55 my time, 5:55 yours. Please add to my charges a box of donuts for Jana Lafrance for working so early in the morn.

[Marko Milisavljevic]

Please accept our apologies for the hour or so our servers plugged up last night.

It happens! But one thing that I'll take this opportunity to complain about (since I don't have much else to complain when it comes to LV) is being asked on every visit what language and geographical location. My suggestion is:

- use a combination of IP geolocation and browser "Accept-Language" flag to guesstimate country/province. For example, you would geolocate me in BC with en-ca in my browser language settings. What are the chances I will select something other than Canada/English? I would guess well under 1%.
- if a user clicks on the flag icon in top/right to manually select language/location, save it in a cookie and respect it in future so it overrides above.

Or something like that. It used to remember it in a cookie in past, but it was buggy and would occasionally send LV home page into infinite redirect, so it looks like it just got turned off instead of getting fixed.

[Hilton Ralphs]

Marko, this all happens now anyway. Your browser is not playing nice.

[Rob Lee]

Hi Marko -

Have sent your comments on to our IT folks - and will let you know what they say. I suspect you may have a corrupt cookie, as we do store both country and language now, and am not aware of any problems in that area. Will get back to you!

Cheers -

Rob

[Ryan Baker]

Yeah, I got caught in the onslaught too. All you guys plugging things up. It took an hour to get through to my cart to start the checkout. I figured there was more at play than just the customer load, as previous years have never had that problem. Frustrating but understandable. I still got through with everything I tried to get (just a little less sleep). The selections were particularly good this year. I wasn't looking for anything, and ended up giving Rob a big lump of cash. Just couldn't pass up the shooter at that price! I looked hard at the skew block pair but let that one go.

[Marko Milisavljevic]

Marko, this all happens now anyway. Your browser is not playing nice.

Clearing leevalley.com cookies in Firefox made it work again as intended.

[Marko Milisavljevic]

Actually... going to http://leevalley.com always results in language selector in different browsers on multiple computers. Going to http://www.leevalley.com works as expected. Emailed to their IT department about it.

[Gary Muto]

As far as I can ascertain, there is no virus. Hilton stated he saw something on the main index (only). The website has been scanned for malware. I looked for any added files. None found. Seems OK to me.

I run off a Mac, and the archived files on my laptop are free of anything malicious. I run ClamXav on all files to be safe.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Good News! I'm glad no real damage was done.

[Gary Muto]

It is working now - I just ordered the jack rabbet plane and a skew rabbet

I got my order in around !:00-1:30 EST. I got the skew rabbet and BUJR Planes and a QR Vise. It sounds like maybe just before they sold out. I always wanted those items but had trouble justifying tehm for more general tools.

Fortunately for me I am visiting family in CA so it was only around 10:30 when I was done.

[Allen Jordan]

Thanks for putting up these sales every year, Rob. A lot of my money sure seems to go your way . The Veritas LA block plane from a previous year is the most-used tool in my shop.

This year I snagged a skew rabbet, 14ppi rip dovetail saw, 14ppi crosscut carcass saw, and cabinet scraper. Can't wait for them to arrive, I've heard especially good reviews for the skew rabbet.

[Jim Matthews]

Somebody is going to be doing laps in the snow around the Lee Valley office without shoes on.

That's known as Tuesdays, on the Rideau canal.
It's the pushups that are painful...

[Chris Wolf]

This was an incredibly frustrating experience. I added items to my cart successfully, but by about 12:15 a.m. EST when I tried to check out the site was no longer working. I sat there reloading the page for over half an hour. There was, of course, no way to tell how long the problem would go on so I gave up, even though I REALLY wanted that skew rabbet plane that I knew was in my cart. I went to bed. I woke up and looked at the clock to see it was about 2:10 a.m. so got up to try again. I found that the site was working and my cart appeared to be intact so I was all set! However, when I went to check out, then it told me that the plane was no longer available. Arrrrrrrgh!

My suggestion would be to delay the start of the sale until some time Monday morning, to make this reasonable for all time zones. The people on the west coast obviously must have made most of the best purchases in this sale simply because the sale fit better with their schedules, especially with the failures because of the overloaded server.

[Simon MacGowen]

Chris,

That was frustrating. Computers could act up without warning, as we all have found out from this or other experiences.

Perhaps for LVT to consider next year: Start the sale at 8pm Sunday instead of midnight so everyone who needs to go to back for work next day has enough time to put things into their carts and, JUST IN CASE, will have a couple extra hours of spare time to see through their orders.

Call it Cyber Sunday Evening sale, if need be (but who says it has to be Cyber Monday to please your customers?). LVT is famous for thinking out of the box and I think this is doable. It is also good for the IT staff on standby.

Personally, I did not stay awake for the sale as I was planning to get some discounted gift cards the next day, if any was left.

Simon

[bob blakeborough]

Nothing personal at all guys but really, asking them to change a sale time/date is silly. It is cyber monday and everybody gets the same rules to play by and it is the same every year. If you move it for one demographic, it will annoy another. If it doesn't work for you, so be it. The reality is everything gets sold so it isn't like it is going to make it a more successful sale for the company. You are all basically just asking for them to bend around your own desires which is kind of self centered.

[Chris Wolf]

Nothing personal at all guys but really, asking them to change a sale time/date is silly

Uh, nothing personal, but asking us not to give them feedback is what is silly. Customer service revolves around finding out what the wishes of your customers are, and then deciding on how you as a business person want to handle the diverse responses you get. If you equate customer wishes with "self-centered" "desires", so be it.