Yesterday at 6pm Central Time, HP was having what they hoped to be a secret promotion to blow out some more Touchpads. I say secret only because the reports were that HP was trying to keep it under their hat, so that their employees could have the first shot at them. But the news got out and there were postings on many blogs about the sale. If HP really wanted to do their employees a “Favour” and offer them purchases first, why would they stick them on the eBay store?! That’s not a favour, it’s more a slap in the face in my opinion.
I tried to purchase a 32BG model starting at 6pm, and was unable to. In less than an hour they were apparently sold out. All but 2 attempts I made gave me eBay error messages claiming the items were unavailable, discontinued, or some other generic error message. On 2 occasions I got my item sent to PayPal for purchase, only to have it say the item is no longer available. The whole time the sale counter kept climbing. When the counter stopped climbing, the page simply stopped responding, no other indication that itmes were sold out. It appeared to stop at the total sales quantity amount of 2771 or 2763. Those 2 numbers would alternate on browser refresh. So if this sale was even for real, they only had about 2700 32BG items to sell.
Personally I’m very unimpressed with how poorly the eBay servers handled this sale. I rarely buy on eBay, and now I have another reason to not waste my time.