Nigeria’s Largest eCommerce site Konga.com decided to embrace this culture. A lot of hypes and marketing were done on social media and radio stations. The black Friday sales was tagged “Fall Yakata Christmas Sales” and it was to start at 9 am Friday November 2013. Anxious customers waited, including myself, for the mouthwatering offers. e.g. a Tecno Phantom A+ phone that was sold for N39,000 was to go for N19,000. The new play station 4 that was selling for N160,000 was going for N60, 000.
Please wake me up, I guess I’m dreaming. Or so I thought
At last the time finally came for the sales. Upon logging onto the Yakata page, customers were greeted with a server error message, meaning the servers had crashed.
The founder of Konga.com predicted the crash of the site with the message below
Konga Yakata sale starts very soon 🙂 already record number of people in store. Nigerians pls don’t crash our site o 🙂
— Sim Shagaya (@Simdul) November 29, 2013
My question is that if he knew the traffic to the site was going to increase astronomically, why were they not prepared for it?
That’s another topic for another day.
I still kept faith that it will be restored. I kept checking back to see the outcome for my beloved PlayStation 4. When the site was restored after about one and the half hours, the links to the page was not functional, the Techno Phantom A+ phone was now been sold for 33,000 and sales attached to it, trying to purchase the new price, it stated “Out of stock”.
I had to leave the site feeling cheated and my time wasted. I was upset because I knew later they would apologise for this incident.
For me, I’m gone, never to return and by the way I had to order from a rival site jumia.com for a new PS3 console. They won my black Friday hard earned cash by not giving out frivolous prices.
