2010 March

We wanted to give some context to Golden Ticket sales now that we have gotten a chance to look at the numbers from the other night.  First, we want to say thank you to everyone.  If the sheer volume of traffic that we received is an indicator of the popularity of Dark Lord Day, this year will be better than any other, and we are doing our best to make sure that we can meet expectations.  After reading through the beer forums, it seems that most of you understand that it’s very difficult for us to anticipate demand for our limited number of Golden Tickets, and that we are making a good faith effort to fix any problems that have arisen.  We tried a number of different things this year to try to make the process as painless and smooth for everyone involved.  As Lincoln said on Beer Advocate,

Will we learn from our mistakes and work to avoid them next year? Absolutely. Will other mistakes be made along the way? Most likely. As an organization of only 9 people, we appreciate the patience and understanding a lot of people on this site are showing. At the end of the day, We’re just trying to throw a fun party for thousands of people and do it in a way that is the most fair we can manage.

So with that being said, here are some numbers to consider.

• Our store had 50,423 hits by 5,115 visitors in less than one hour effectively crushing Shopify’s servers
• The majority referred through twitter
• darklordday.com had 16,963 unique visitors
• 3floyds.com had 12,542 unique visitors
• #DarkLordDay and “Golden Tickets” were both trending topics on Twitter at the same time.

Pretty big numbers when you take a step back and look at them.  And again, thank you all for your patronage and most of all patience while we sort everything out over the next few days.  The shipping charges that were erroneously added during the melee are being removed.  A whole lot was happening and we were trying to fix the charges on the fly while the site was crashing.

So with all of that in mind, please don’t forget that we are a comparatively tiny brewery trying to plan a kick ass time for a whole bunch of people, and we don’t even know how many people are going to show up.  Even with all of the planning in the world a successful Dark Lord Day still depends on all of you out there making it a great time for everyone else that shows up.  Keep an eye on Darklordday.com for updates and we’ll see you on April 24th.

A cool video showing the most recent artwork addition at the brewery

Yikes!

http://twitter.com/3floyds

Thanks for everyone who purchased golden tickets, that was a wild ride. There where a few hiccups along the way but everything should be sorted out now.

A couple of things to note:

No one will be charged shipping. There was a hiccup in our admin system that caused shipping charges to be added to golden tickets. These charges will not be applied to your credit card. We are removing all shipping charges from your orders.

The site outage was regrettable, but wow, we brought down shopify. We received this email shortly after our services where restored.

Hey guys, Mike from Shopify here.

We’re extremely sorry for the bad showing we gave to your flash-sale of tickets on your Shopify store. I’m afraid you cought us with our pants down with the sheer volume of customers all at once, our datacenter couldn’t handle that many orders a second. We had to disable inventory tracking on all of Shopify temporarily, otherwise we couldn’t keep the system up. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused to you and especially your customers.

Sincerely,

Mike Rochon
Head of Support
Shopify.com

The traffic was amazing. We’ll try and get some actual numbers together for you in the near future. Because of the constant refreshing we’ll be testing for duplicate orders and making sure nobody got charged twice for tickets.

So rest assured we will be burning the midnight oil making sure your tickets get to you hassle free. Until then we’ll be toasting a Three Floyds beer to all you Dark Lord Fanatics.