Free Day Recap

"Nice job IT".
That sums it up. So does the upbeat tone of your message. You guys really dropped the ball and there is no white washing it.
Seriously you guys need to stick to embedded stuff if you think that was a nice job. Do you realize that most people could not access the main page much less place an order. I suspect the only orders that got in were logged in and had a full cart way before the thing started.
You may have made 1000 customers happy or one in every 70 that tried to get in.
Nice job?
I'm still totally amazed at how poorly implemented this spectacle was.
Wow. Just. Wow.

I have to say this was a very frustrating experience. This was the worst shopping experience I have ever faced in all of my life, to tell the truth. I had everything ready for checkout the day prior to the event, but after hours this morning hopelessly trying to checkout, I gave up.
I am very disappointed on how this was all planned out. And I keep wondering if this really did "give back to the community" in a meaningful way and not a huge publicity stunt.
Congratulation to the people who did get the freebies. I will be turning my business back towards Digikey and Robotshop.

I can't believe people are being so negative. I've been looking forward to this for weeks, and spent all morning without getting past the loading page, but I still think it was a cool concept. Thanks Sparkfun. Congrats to those who made the cut.

As a customer and a supporter on various hardware forums, I have known about today for a while.
I had my cart ready to go, I was up at 6:30 SF time,I was going to get this! But every time I tried to get on, the site did not time out, it did not give blank pages, all it did was flat out refused to connect, connection refused, server reset loop, for 3 hours.
When I was able to get logged in, most of what I had in my cart was replaced with random items.Well by then the event balance was well over 70k so no chance in hell for me.
Congrats on clearing out 100 grand of stuff right before tax season, and letting 40% of this event wind up on ebay.Also thanks for nothing, When we needed you, you opted to let every ebay leech and 1 time freebee hunter artificially inflate your numbers for 1 day.
I will not be recommending or visiting SF any more, NOT! because "i didnt get my free swag" but it gave me more insight to the "little effort as possible to make a buck, from anyone dumb enough to let us" attitude that appears in most aspects of SF.
From the questionable quality of the items, to the drag ass shipping response time.

While I applaud the idea of free day I was left totally unimpressed. In general over the several years I've been a customer Sparkfun was in the "way cool" category. Today it transitioned to "you suck."
When the appointed hour came I began trying the site. With countless attempts there was not a single time that I could even see a Sparkfun web page much less try to actually order anything. I was very briefly excited when a page started to load... until I realized it was telling me that people who were actually allowed to see the website got all the giveaways and there were none left for the rest of us.
I had hoped to use this as an opportunity to try out a couple of products I didn't really have a specific project for but seemed to have potential. Instead I wasted a lot of my time.
That whole "any press is good press" thing? Not so good for retail folks who fail to deliver.

although I did not get through to make an order (no big deal), my grandmother did and now I'll have an LCD screen and protoshield for wiring and debugging programs on my arduino <-- to all you who think people are just selling their items, mine will go to good use

NOW YOU CENSOR THE FORUMS??!! by deleting a post i made about freeday, that's pathetic.
all I said was you say that you are giving back to the customers that "gave you a stellar year" But you didn't give to us you gave to everyone else!
this was a big publicity STUNT not "giving back to the customers that gave you that $100,000" So stop putting out the BS and admit that.
Deleting posts is PATHETIC.

To start: I didnt get my order in despite spending an hour hitting refresh. However, I think that this was a great thing for SparkFun to do. They were trying to give back to their community. The fact that some people decided to wrongly use the situation and to ruin it for real SparkFun followers isn't SparkFun's fault. If you think it was unfair, it wasn't something you were entitled to, it was something that SparkFun decided to do with their own money. So deal with it.
Props to SparkFun, I think that this was a great idea, you guys rock!

As one of the lucky people who did get through, thank you SparkFun!
But whilst I'm very grateful that I won, I still think the way this was executed was totally brainless. I don't think it's fair to say people are annoyed just because they didn't win free stuff. Rather, people are (rightly) annoyed that the promotion was so badly planned and executed.
Surely it wouldn't have taken much effort to think of some other way to run the promotion that was faster and fairer. Some sort of lottery perhaps? And that didn't DDoS the servers such that even people who were willing to pay full price weren't able to get through to the site for the best part of the day.
Honestly, I think Nate should pay more attention to the sentiments of people posting here. It's pretty insensitive of him to pretend the event was a total success when, in reality, it was carried out so poorly.
I mean, hey, I managed to get through and even I'm annoyed. And I'm an existing SparkFun customer, too. Doesn't speak well for keeping your customers happy, does it?

I think this whole event burnt more people than helped.
Right now, most are without, and feel like they wasted their time and energy. I suggest sparkfun not attempt this again, because I know of a few customers they've lost already. People are talking, and letting server functionality determine a random payout is unprofessional, it's also disrespectful and belittling to the client- ie; just bad customer service. If you're going to offer something, knowing that it's random in nature, be sure to play that up, not make it sound like a given to anyone involved.
Just calling it "free day" implies that you're giving away free parts all day, to everyone, while 'lucky discount day' is really a better term for it.
Yep, I hoped since thanksgiving, and got nil- and yes, I'm not happy my time was wasted instead of just being outright turned down. That's very disrespectful towards me, the customer. I would never dream of torturing a client in such a manner.

I'm sorry, I can't believe you are still claiming first and foremost "you wanted to give back". In order to give 'back' required the person to have given to you first, ie loyal customers only. What you did was 'give away' to anyone and turned what seemed like (and you still believe apparently) a warm sentiment into a cheap lottery joke. Had I know I was facing 1:70 odds i won't not have wasted my time.
This is my opinion, and I entitled to have it. Sparkfun has joined the league of evil companies with PR stunts like this.

To all of those whiners that will never be a SparkFun customer ever again because of this:
Good Riddance.
That is all.

It would be awesome if they could gauge specific projects/people and help sponsor them, but it's nearly impossible to do without being biased or come under attack in some way from some group.
I applaud SF's efforts, and thank them for the chance to try. It really was a lot of fun and broke my normal work routine into something fun and worth fighting for. Though I was one of the people who honest to gosh never saw the website (not sure how anyone did really), I'm not going to say they owe me a living, or that their IT sucks--it was a crapshoot people, and the SA's learned a lot as well and they admitted it.
Hopefully maybe sometime this year I can find some extra money in the budget to get an Arduino and have fun with it, until then I'll just keep tinkering with what I have and dumpster diving and grabbing parts from stuff.
SparkFun, thanks again for the chance, hopefully you guys do even better this year than in past years!

well they have deleted 3 threads i tried to make on the forum, they must not want anything but a positive viewpoint on their Publicity stunt.

I had my dad try to order me some parts from the office while I was at school. He says that he filled the cart, but was never able to check-out.
Man, I've been dreaming about this for a while. Oh well, I guess I'll try to scrape up another $100, and wait 'till after robotics season.
Thanks, anyway, it's still cool you did this. I hope Andrew was able to get what he wanted...

Thanks sparkfun for the great opportunity! I just wanted to post my appreciation for the event and let you know I will be returning for more stuff. It's too bad some people don't get what you were doing for them. I really hope those that are complaining and reselling stuff they got get what's coming to them as that was not the spirit of the day.

I think that this is not fare. I've made several orders and i couldn't make this order. If i'm one of those ho is part of sparkfun because i make my orders here and not in other shop, this free day should be made other way. I'm sure that many of the people who made the order on the free day din't know sparkfun before or had never done an order here.
I'm very dissapointed.
From Barcelona

Heh, should have heard the swearing going on from our project lab as we all tried to get in to buy some stuff.
"*&@W%^"
5 seconds later...
"%^#H#! let me buy stuff!"
....

I can't believe the people that are mad at SparkFun; they did it with good intent, and they certainly didn't owe you anything.

I'm not sure if you guys were PCI compliant by stating that you were "testing" the servers with the public. If you have credit card info (shopping cart) you must test on a test server. I'll be surprised if your server doesn't have a few viruses because at least one out of the 100K was a hacker! Makes me wonder just how safe your shopping cart really is now! Am I upset because I didn't get anything? No. Just upset at how it was done. For those of us that were up very early with shopping carts already full, we should have had first chance, but it was a "lottery" (and I absolutely cannot stand "lotteries" at all, so I won't participate again!). For me, it was the whole "test servers" crap that I don't buy into, and you should not have tested your servers on us or advertised as such.
VERY UNPROFESSIONAL!!

I hate it when people who got things tell others not to complain. Easy for them to say! Sure, I didn't lose any money, but I lost 2 hours and 45 minutes preparing and trying to order. I'm really pissed, because if I just stuck to my work (yes I was at work) I could've made close to that $100. Great job, sparkfun. You've made 1000 people happy, and 70000 unhappy. I would have been totally happy, though, if instead of wasting thousands of dollars on new servers, you just rented some space on the Amazon Cloud. Then the people who actually got up early would've been the ones to get free stuff, not the ones who just stumbled upon the site, made an account, and got super lucky. You should've made it only available to people who've made orders before. What angers me even more is that you think that you did a good job. Good idea, very, very poor execution. This ended up to be a huge game based 100 percent on luck. That's not the kind of game I, or any sane person here, would like to waste their time on. The lottery is different. This is just... disgusting.

Yeah this whole fiasco pissed me off so much, I've decided to not buy anything from Sparkfun.... Plenty of other places to buy the same goods...

Thanks, guys. I tried, and tried, and tried, and finally... failed! Even so, I had a lot of fun, and I'll be ordering some "non-free" stuff soon!

This is still sad as I've seen from Hackaday's discussion on it with everybody gloating that they got X or Y or that they're going to resell it when others that deserved a chance at the promotion got shot out from the start.
There has to be some way - some form of genius - that would enable you to review groups and their projects/needs for a sponsorship of some kind. I know I've already had to scrap a project now that I've planned for a couple months - because Free Day was one of my only chances at getting even barebones parts to start it.

I have ordered from Sparkfun several times in the past. I really like the company, with BatchPCB, a lot of the breakout boards, tutorials, etc you do a lot to support the hobby community. I always wish I had known about you guys when I was still in school and had more time to tinker. I know other sites charge less for the basic components but I still order some of them from you just to help support the business. I even keep a sparkfun wish list for my self just waiting until I have to order from you so I can add in a couple cool things. I had my cart loaded up early and was hoping to get some cool stuff on freeday. I didn?t and I ended up feeling pretty frustrated and upset. I know I really shouldn?t be since you guys were just helping out. I was trying to think how to get back at a company I like and want to support but I am currently mad at for stupid reasons. So, in the same vein as desert bus for hope I am going to torture you with money. You shipping department now has one more order they have to fulfill ;) I like to imagine some unkempt guy with a 5 day old beard and lack of sleep blinking repeatedly as he tries to see straight enough to slap yet another shipping label on my box, not realizing he left the packing peanut gun on while it spills foam all over the room :)

This was a failure. Look at the stats. Look at how many American's got in vs how many from other countries. While english-speaking geeks the world over have been trying, only those within close proximity had a real chance. The numbers get smaller and smaller the further away you go.
Now, take a look at twitter. I counted over 100 people bragging that they were using botnets, bragging that they were going to sell their "winnings," or that they had done some other dirty trick. How many upset, dissapointed and estranged geeks did you create vs. how many new customers have you gotten? I'll wager that you've actually experienced a net loss in customers.
Once more back to the stats. More than 110,000 visits. 1035 actual sales. 9% of your new and old customers made it through, while 91% were snubbed.
Sparkfun, if you ever consider doing something like this again... please revise your plans. This did much more to hurt your reputation than it did to help you.

Ok, so 111,493 page hits in 1:44, or 104min, works out to 1072.04 page hits per min or 17.8 page hits per sec. I'm surprised your servers didn't melt ;) Congrats on the marketing value this had. I am no good at reading, and thought it was tomorrow. Dumb little me. It's ok though, I still have my SFE christmas gift card. Here we go intro to ARM! Congrats, and long live SFE!

Great job, Sparkfun. I didn't get my order through, but I enjoyed the spectacle. I'll order some more parts soon, although maybe not quite as many as I would have with the $100 incentive. Sorry that some people are reacting so poorly, I guess they had unrealistic expectations of what the morning would be like. As long as you continue to shine with your quality products, information, and service, I'll keep being a happy customer with or without fun diversions like this. Happy Birthday!

Sparkfun, Thanks!
To the whiners, how about you pony up $100K in free goodies!
Next time, maybe just a student discount? 10% for college students and %15 for high school students. They could fax/pdf/email their school ID's?

If you think about it, the server slowdown made for a more even playing field. It didn't really matter how fast your connection was; it was all a matter of mostly-random chance. If your connection attempt was perfectly timed it went through, otherwise it bounced.
Regarding the issue of sponsoring projects; why not have a competition? It seems doable with a minimal amount of resources. i.e. Write up/post contest specs... contestants email entries in... Sparkfun staff picks top 20... drop some poll/voting code on the site... members vote... winner gets freebies for their project... and Sparkfun gets some more content in the form of a detailed writeup on the winner's project.

I was ready for the submit button since last night at this time. I woke up and sat at the computer anxiously waiting to press submit, and when the time came, I did...
Connection Reset
Connection Timed Out
I never did get my order though, but I'm not angry at all. What SparkFun has done is great. They're a pretty small company from what I understand, and to give away... just give away $100,000 worth of stuff astounds me! That's a lot! A whole lot! It was a very generous thought that will provide many with the tools and parts to come up with tomorrow's 'gotta have' item.

Its funny all these people who really feel SF was doing something good for them.
SparkFun was simply taking advantage of thousands of people for financial and internet status benefit.
I wouldnt be surprised to see that someone finds their tactics were illegal in some sense and get taken to court over it.

I don't know why anybody thought that they would have much of a chance to get anything. According to the post, there were ~100K people logging on. Even if it was only $1 off there would still be people who wouldn't get anything.
As for those who think that it was poorly executed, let me tell you it wasn't. Sparkfun isn't made to take this many visitors at once (10x the normal). To put it in therms that the technically illiterate can understand: imagine you sometimes have 5 family members stay at your house (a brother and his family, maybe). Then imagine that you got 50 people staying over on a night. Just like you, your toilets would be spewing ****.
If, like me, you didn't get anything then you shouldn't be complaining. Nobody made you participate, it was just your selfishness that made you think you would, and complain about it afterwards.
Thanks Sparkfun for doing something completely different. I enjoyed the rush.

I accept that some people feel upset, but Sparkfun really didn't owe them anything. We all came into this knowing it was a lucky-dip. When I got up at 2:45am this morning to try my luck, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I didn't think my order would get through and I expected to be doing a lot of page refreshing. In the end, it took around 1 hour 40 minutes to place my order. When the success page returned, the current total was $99,987.50. That made me among the last 10 people to get through. Phew!
Despite the comments on twitter and elsewhere, the servers were obviously not dead. With that many attempts for HTTP/S connections, the servers were never going to be snappy for everyone.
Give Sparkfun a break - they did a good thing for over 1000 enthusiasts like you and I, and that can only benefit us all. Hopefully those who took advantage of the offer will 'pay it back' by documenting their projects online for everyone to benefit. I know I will.

Well you sure did get your moneys worth of publicity. It will be fun to see all the stuff on ebay in the comming weeks.

I'm a broke college student who found out about this site a few weeks ago. I was lucky enough to get my order through for a little under $100 worth of stuff. I've taken an intro course for micro-controllers but didn't learn nearly as much as I wanted to. This provides me with an awesome opportunity I didn't think I'd get. I'll definitely be back should I need more components. Thanks SF : )
It is unfortunate that there are those who would take advantage of this generous offer to make a quick buck off it. Wonder how many Arduinos will be up on ebay this coming week?

Great work guys! I don't know if anyone will truly appreciative we all are for the experience.
As for the complainers, shame on you. Please recognize that not only was this a promotional event for SparkFun, but it was also a means of giving back to the community.
SparkFun is #1 forever :)

Congrats that it survived, but i don't like even a remote hinting that the site was even close to being up, because i have one fast internet, with a huge bandwidth, and the site wouldn't even load, with 9% of the time a unable to connect error, and the rest with a timeout error, so today will probably the only day i'm disappointed with sparkfun, but don't stop, or be discoraged by all this bad feedback today ;)

Now I have missed the cheapest tickets in the past, but I knew it was from getting to tickets.burningman.com too late, not because their server couldn't handle the load, so it started spitting out cheap tickets on a completely random basis.
It amazes me how badly you managed to screw up giving away something of value, with nothing to show for your money except massive amounts of ill will and former customers. I feel like you lied to me when you explained how your promotion was going to work, and I have no tolerance for that.
-- Doug Lippincott

Truly, do you believe it is possible to spend more money in an hour and 45 minutes and accomplish less?
My customer number is 31309, and I've left my cart open. I'm definitely still interested in the Saleae logic analyzer, but I will be buying it direct from Saleae, rather than you. I won't ever again buy something from you that I can find anywhere else.
As a side note, if you ever decide to do something like this again, talk to the people who run Burning Man. In about a week they will put 9000 tickets on sale for $210 each, and they will be gone in 3-4 hours, with a maximum of 2 tickets per person.. Those tickets will be sold on a first-come-first-served basis, with everyone able to see where they are in the queue as soon as they click the button that says they want to buy. The queue position is a number that steadily drops, and when it gets to zero, the purchase process will go very smoothly. No one will get timeout errors. Miss the window to buy $210 tickets, and you will pay $240 as part of the next group of 9000.

c) Given any potential new customers a horrible first impression. I had personally recommended SparkFun to 5 people, and now I will be apologizing to them for such a bad suggestion.
Now there is something important going on here that you will miss if you aren't paying attention. You didn't owe me a $100 discount on the $170 order that was in my cart, but what you did owe me was honesty. You represented this all along as a first-come-first-serve opportunity. Well, I was probably one of the very first to submit my order, and I do not believe 1000 people got ahead of me in the first 3 seconds you were open for business.
Ok, maybe it wasn't 3 seconds. The 4 browser windows I had open all showed different count-down times, but I was definitely submitted within a second or two of the first one saying you were open.
What you billed as first-come-first-served was in reality a game of chance, with the winners chosen by random browser timing. I played by the rules as you laid them out and did everything right, only to come up a loser with nothing to show for 6 hours.

Since Customer Service refuses to confirm my e-mail will be passed along to their president, I'll post it here (in 4 parts because of message-length limitations) in the hope he sees it.
Just wondering -- do you think there was anything you could have done to make your promotion more self-defeating? was up at 4 AM, California time and finally succeeded in getting the products I wanted to buy into my cart by 7:00. rom 8:00 until 10:00 I sat in front of my browser refreshing windows in an attempt to complete the order, but mostly what I got was time-out errors. wice I actually got to the screen to specify my shipping method, but clicking send sent the browser into never-never land, from which that session never returned.
Congratulations. You spent $100,000 to:
a) Prove to the world that you have no idea how to build an e-commerce site that can be scaled to meet demand, and
b) Pissed off a huge number of customers, a large number of which (like me) will go out of their way to avoid ever buying anything again from Sparkfun.

To the haters and Sparkfun crew. While I didn't manage to squeeze into one of those coveted first 1000 spots (not from lack of effort), I commend Sparkfun for giving us the opportunity, and as a result plan to complete my order anyway (although I'll wait a couple weeks to let them catch up).
I am not a returning customer, and in fact I had never even heard of Sparkfun prior to this event. However I intend to be a returning customer going forward, as a result of their obvious appreciation of their customers, and enthusiasm for what they do.
To those complaining about the folks grabbing up free stuff only to hawk it on eBay...welcome to the world around you...you don't like it, change it! Also, if you've never run an e-commerce site, trying to predict load when it can range from 1 to 1 billion potential customers....I suggest you give it a try before you cast stones.
Congrats to those who made it through yesterday, and thank you Sparkfun for living up to your name!

If you're planning and relying on a lottery's chance.. you're not PLANNING you're HOPING.
Broke college student? I hear you. Trust me, I hear you, and I know it hurts. But if you can't find a way to save $100 or earn it or just get donations from people, to save your thesis project doctorate whatever.. you might want to reconsider your situation in life and what your priorities really are. And yes, there are "genuinely unable to make any extra room in their pockets" people, but I doubt those people are the ones going "woe is me, FML".
Is it a slap in the face of die-hard SF'ers? It can be seen as such. Was it a way to get a helluvamount of site traffic and promotion? Yup. Are people going to resell some stuff who aren't SF'ers or even tinkerers? Yup.. and that happens all through life.
(cont)

Total came to about $112 I think.
Well from the second Free day started until it ended, I was able to see the site a total of 4 times. Two of those times I was trying to get the checkout process started, and after a long wait and several refreshes, it just pushed me back to the main website and logged me out. This isn't counting the timeouts or denials. Two other times it was just trying to finish loading the HTML but never completed.
I tried using 4 different networks, two of them right from a console on fiber backbones, but never saw more than a few lines of HTML. I knew the servers were the bottlenecks themselves, just hoped the fiber would aid in some small way haha.
Am I mad? Nope, I had a great time trying. I wasn't out anything, and to be honest none of us were, even the people I've seen who said "I based my whole college thesis project on these parts" or "I planned months on a project and needed these parts now FML". I'm sorry, that's a bunch of crap. (cont)

I read a bunch of comments on here, hating SF, loving SF, and everything in between. Let me first say, I've never been a prior customer of SF. However, I have always checked the website and looked at all the great things I wanted to buy to further a project, start a project or learn something new. I don't believe in registering for a commerce site unless I'm going to buy something, which is why I didn't have an account until the day before Free Day.
Always wanted to get an Arduino to help me on some of my "I wish I could do this" projects, and to prototype with. In fact, I want to build a homebrew underwater ROV just for the heck of it since I live near some bodies of water, and wanted the brains of it to be an Arduino Mega.
I heard about Free day a month back, and kept waiting eagerly. Created an account for the first time the other night, put a couple things in my shopping cart (Arduino Mega, some RGB led's I needed, and an Arduino Duemilanove. (continued)

The sad part is that I was hitting refresh on the wrong page! So close, either way I am now part of the large number of people who are considering just buying their cart of stuff anyway. Sparkfun rocks!

Pre-Free Day: Wow thanks SF, you are awesome!!!
Post-Free Day: man, you !@#$%# SOB SF
??? ---Sometimes you just can't win...
I got something from this free day, a broken F5 key...
China, 1/4 of the world's population, and not a single item was won by someone in China. That's an interesting stat.
I enjoyed Free Day, except for those moments when I realized I didn't get any goodies... awww.. just had one of those moments...
What was I writing about again?

Unfortunately I wasn't one of these lucky 1,035 users even I had everything prepared just for checkout. I could refresh first page three times seeing how fund decreased but checkout page gave me only timeouts.
The whole game based only on pure luck like a lottery and as it took one and quarter hour I think everyone had possibility which is good. If this server had been ultra fast and served every visitor and fund had ended in fist five-ten seconds then it couldn't been so fair at all.
But still I placed my order (a little bit more than $100) one hour later when server worked like a charm again!
Thank you for this chance! :-)

What a cool promotional event! I'm sad that despite near militaristic organization on my part, my strongest efforts were insufficient to get my order placed. But it's no matter, it was a fun little game to play. Thankfully of me and my two buddies, one got his order in! lol.
Thanks for the fun scramble SF!

I was another one of those who had a full cart last night and was ready to hit the button at 9:00. My wife and I refreshed on multiple machines for the duration of the giveaway. We didn't get anything. IT WAS AWESOME!
We got to see one of our favorite sites get tons of attention. We experienced the thrill of getting a page farther into checkout, the disappointment of server timeouts. Anyone who thought this was going to turn out differently was fooling himself/herself. Faster servers would have made the two hours of random people getting through into two minutes of random people getting through. Either way, you get exactly what was advertised - a chance.
Way to go SparkFun! I'm a frustrated customer who now has a cart with $100 of stuff I'll be buying some day. I'm glad that things went the way they did.
Loyal SparkFun customers unite!

Customer3145: NOW YOU CENSOR THE FORUMS??!! by deleting a post i made about freeday, that's pathetic.
Were you the guy posting ASCII penises (penii?) on the forums? Yeah, those got deleted. :) The tone of this message suggests why you might have had a post or two deleted, too.
Seriously, it's their forum, and thus, their rules. But the Internet is big, and opportunities for you to speak are everywhere. Start a blog, or perhaps twitter your discontent over not getting your freebies. :)

I wish people would understand that it was a grand thing for a company like sparkfun to do this and I want to say thank you so very much...

After reading all the comments I would agree with one thread I saw several times: The original concept of "free day" was to give back. that would mean existing customers by my way of thinking. Opening it up to everyone created pandemonium. If you ever do this again I have a suggestion: create 1000 random numbers, perhaps 6 digit numbers. Give your existing customer base 30 days to submit a single 6 digit guess. In 30 days, announce the winners (the 1000 closest guesses). Completely fair, no server overload.

I don't know what was "exciting", "entertaining", "incredible", "fun", etc., about 2 hours of browser time-outs. IMO it was annoying at best. While the promotion seemed like a good idea on paper a month ago, the actual "sale" left a bad taste in my mouth which is now going to result in lost sales for you.
I've purchased from Sparkfun before, but the general annoyance I feel after this is going to keep me away. The things I wanted today but couldn't buy will be purchased from some of my other favorite vendors.
To make it worse, all the self-praise the Sparkfun has cranked out for itself in the above text is just obnoxious considering that nothing worked today, except for about 1000 people. I haven't seen such out-of-touch self promotion since the MS Windows Vista launch a few years ago.

Nicely done, Sparkfun! One heck of a promotion!
I'm a bit bummed, I could have used those components for my ham radio projects, but that's the way it goes. I'll just have to save my pennies for another day.
I'll be back... :)

zach kurth: I think the servers were massive failures to this thing,
i sat on the cart page and i clicked the checkout button a couple of times, order never went through, i will be uploading some videos to youtube very soon about what happened on my end of the line, and for those who got it to work, here is what actually happened to the less lucky,.
the youtube channel is
led235
i will have the videos on before the nights end.
feel free to comment as well,
but hey, sparkfun did have success, so oh well
VIDEO OF A FAILED ATTEMPT IS ON YOUTUBE!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs0-2fpL2n4

I want everyone to know how much Free Day meant to me, and I hope it meant the same to others.
This was an incredibly fun/frustrating event. If it had just been some random coupon for 75% off, free shipping, or basically anything other than what they did, Free Day would have been another generic promotion.
Sure some 100,000+ people didn't get anything, simple math told all of us that $100 out of $100,000 is only going to be about 1,000 orders. And in fact they were cool enough to let orders roll over that limit.
As my favorite twitter post of the day said:
"synthemesc: i wonder if anyone would have liked it more (or complained less) if @sparkfun free day took 25 seconds instead."

I did have my cart loaded up and logged in, but couldn't get through. sad for me. Thanks though SF.
You know, I had been carefully choosing the items in my cart for a couple of weeks. Things I hadn't bought before, because I didn't flat out need them. But this allowed me to find some things that I might want, like a ClocKit and MetroGnome to build with the kids, hey that might be fun to get them into electronics. And now I'm sad I didn't get what I've worked myself into needing. So I might go ahead and order them in the future, because now I need them.....
Good free scheme I think, to cause customers to translate wants into needs, if they don't get it for free.

Damn, I really wanted that power supply. Im certainly pissed I spent 45 minutes pressing F5 to no avail, and was late to work as a result. I am not pissed at Sparkfun though, more like the internets gods.
Thank you for giving us a chance. Thank you for having a great site for electronics hobbyists.
I have bought from you in the past and will continue to buy from you in the future, but you'll have to wait till after tax season to get my monies.
While I can recognize the great publicity generated from this event, maybe next time just do a sale or something... Thats how I was planning on treating it. 30%-50% off and spread over a week would be awesome.
/$0.02

First of all, great job SparkFun for thinking of this idea! The only company I know that had a great year, and so decided to give back. Plus a great PR move, and especially clever so that people know the difference between Sparkfun and Sparc;)
Reading these posts, it seems that what bothers many folks is not knowing why some got orders through, and others not (mine did not): the rate of orders increased very quickly near the end, so something was working better and better, but there was no feedback on IRC as to what was going on. For example, the page said "hitting F5 won't help", but some posts make it seem like it would have. I had exactly one page load in the two hours, despite starting with a full cart, all info, etc., and was frustrated not at the fact that my order didn't go through, but that I didn't know why it was working for others.
Again, nice job, especially in preparation, and way to pull things together to even get through it!

NXTreme NXTreme: _ And if you lost 2 hours in which you could have made another $100 well, sorry:)_
This comment pisses me off just as much as the other people. Some of us are full time students and don't have the time nor the money to buy nice things. Nor do we have the $100/hr wage that you high and mighty people have.

111: Free day went exactly as expected and exactly as advertised. It is unfortunate that some people had higher expectations that were dashed. /2?
Speaking like a guy who got the deal. Where exactly is advertised as 2 hours of torture. May not be fun for the winners to watch but I would say most would expect it to either be lucky or not in a relativly painless way.

U guys kick-arse! BTW, are you hiring? I'll move to Boulder, and work for cheap. I am a damn good programmer... I can lift heavy objects ... I can even balance things on my nose! I don't need a desk, I can just sit on the floor. If you don't need another programmer; I could just wander around the office & entertain people while they work. Let me know if you're interested, I'll forward my resume & pictures of balancing things on my nose.
FYI for next year, maybe you should just give away free Arduino's, or Mega's. That way you could get more people in on Freeday & you would get a boost in additional sales on the sensors & accessories. Sort of like how printers are given away to generate cartridge sales. I bet the profit from the resulting sales would offset a big chunk of the promotion cost. Possibly enough that it would be feasible to have two or three Freedays every year!!!
Think about it... microprocessors are like drugs for nerds; Once they get a taste, they only want more & more!

NXTreme: _ And if you lost 2 hours in which you could have made another $100 well, sorry:) _
If you're making $50/hr and you want to spend 2 hours to get $100 of SparkFun merchandise, that would have been pretty easy to do last week.

I won't say whether I "won" or not, all I'll say is that I'm extremely dissapointed, not with SparkFun but with all those people who are crying because they didn't "win". I started this thinking "I don't care whether I get some free stuff or not. I know I will learn something anyways and, as they say, knowledge is power". It was FREE, come on! It's like the lottery only you don't have to pay to get a shot at winning something! You didn't lose anything aside from, at most, 2 hours of time. And if you lost 2 hours in which you could have made another $100 well, sorry:) There is no lack of ways to make $$. Go clean out your attic/basement, your sure to find plenty of junk that you could sell on eBay. I do sympathize with those who didn't get part of the cake; It's not fun to wait with all the stuff you ever wanted sitting in your shopping cart just to fail on getting your order in. But, you where warned. Please, SF did this for YOU and for everyone else around here. The only problem is that there where too many "everyone else's" around here. One more thing. If you bought stuff just to sell it on eBay, SHAME!!!

Thank you so much for doing this. I tried to get in this morning to get some parts for my robot for the AVC but my browser kept timing out. I figured I would try today, and since I didn't get in It means I will have to wait a few paychecks to get the sensors. Oh well it was fun.
Thank You again
Brian

I hope everyone posts links to their projects once they get started, community is what this is all about after all.

octanetripledax: _ I would have been totally happy, though, if instead of wasting thousands of dollars on new servers, you just rented some space on the Amazon Cloud. _
I would have still loaded my cart last night, had my account ready by virtue of the fact that I already have an account, and I still would have checked out the second my time-server-synced clock clicked over past 11:00 A.M. EST. So would tens of thousands of other people.
I really don't understand the desire to vastly increase the rate at which a finite inventory amount is given away to a tiny fraction of the people who want it.
Yes, it would have saved you some time. So would noticing the buzz to likely winners ratio and just not bothering to try :-)

This was a stupid computer trick. We were all lined up outside the website, like at Wal-Mart at 5:00 am in the morning for a limited number of door busters.
Well, no surprise when the doors opened it was a total virtual chaos. It was just the blind luck of the internet draw to determined who got in. It certainly wasn't those who showed up at the start time. The home page loaded exactly twice in 45 minutes and I never got to the shopping cart.
What started out as a reward to the loyal customers, turned into a lottery with most people holding a losing ticket. It sure doesn't make me want to click the buy button after I can get into the website (only after the free stuff was gone) from my shopping cart.
Next time, offer something like 50% off up to a total of $200 for the whole day. This scales much better. This how everybody else does promotions.

In the last few days, I read the site and comments on other websites about Free Day and I almost elected not to participate because it seemed like it was nearly certain that the servers would crash.
Right here on Sparkfun, they said "there will be timeouts." But I loaded a BlueSMIRF Gold and some USB BT dongles into my cart to the tune of $98 and hit "Checkout" at 11:00:03 EST, and refresh x 200. I was sitting at my computer anyway, working on something else. Didn't cost me more than a few minutes of actual activity to try.
If Sparkfun had installed infinite server capacity, a thousand people with pre-loaded carts (like mine) would have had their orders placed within the average time it takes a human to quickly complete the order process... what, two or three minutes?
Free Day would have been Free Three Minutes.
And all that extra capacity installed just to support Free Day would never be used again. I think the folks who didn't know that sparkfun.com was going to slow to a crawl today just weren't paying enough attention.
If you don't like butting heads with people who want free stuff, don't do it. We all know how it goes, always and forever. I almost never choose to participate because it always goes off like this.

I got through, so my opinion probably doesn't count, but I personally can't believe the whinging.
Given the geek nature of the site, I was expecting to face scripted snipers purchasing all the free within a few minutes. I was surprised to get through at all, even having prepared in advance.
How many of you complaining would have spent $100 if it wasn't free? Go buy a lottery ticket and complain to them when you don't win.

I had a notion my tiny order would be overwhelmed by traffic. Also my guess of 10:39 AM was pretty good.
Before I embark on a little constructive criticism (of which I am sure you heard enough by now) comes the more important praise: GREAT IDEA! Thank you guys! My order didn't make it but non the less I had the same chance as the others. THANK YUO SPARKFUN!
Now don't let the following remarks get to you. You still did more then most other companies but I have to say:
1.) Advertisement is good but real charity does without publicity
2.) Organisation was poor. Why not make it a whole freeday, throw every order of that day in a lottery and give people who don't win the chance to take their order back. Maybe in advance by a checkbox or something.
3.) Sell stuff for PBC fabrication ;-)
Still greatfull you did it. Yeah, Sparkfun!

I wonder how many people got to the checkout entered their credit cards, checked out 50 times trying to get it to go through, charging their card in the process and the order never making it to Sparkfun because the server wouldnt complete it. OOOHH thats gonna hurt SparkFun if this happened and they get a bunch of chargebacks.

This was the perfect opportunity for me. I have zero experience with electronics but after seeing what people can do I thought I would give it a shot. I first saw that Sparkfun was having a free day in November and was able to read a few books about Arduino before the day came. So with an Arduino starter kit, a few tools, some sensors and a T-shirt coming my way I should be ready to start fiddling around. Plus with it being basically free at this point my wife is okay with me starting a new hobby. Because of this opportunity Sparkfun will always have my business. Thanks

This may be a sad statement, but this may have been the most fun on the internet I have ever had. Never thought that clicking refresh over and over could be more exciting than some of my favorite games. As for what I got (bluetooth dip module, blackberry trackball breakout and keypad) we'll see if i can build a bluetooth keypad/mouse, and when thats done, the real fun will begin, with a steam punk digitizer and keyboard.

Happy Free Day, guys!
Disappointing to those who didn't get stuff and probably deserve it, but; such is life, I guess. :(

Sad I wasn't able to participate in the fun, but oh well. Hope everyone who got an order through puts their goodies to good use!
Congrats to SparkFun, Happy Anniversary, and thanks for the awesome day!
P.S. The guesses graph link has an extra http in it.

I think I just realized what was going on here. This was all an attack on Sparc for their attempt at taking taking SparkFun's name from them. Think about it, now that they achieved the levels they did today on the internet, Sparc will never get another hit from any search engine when the word Sparc is searched for. It will now show nothing but SparkFun.
Nice move I guess!!!

I didn't get my order in but I sure had fun trying. Well done!!

I assure you that there are other methods of randomly distributing 1000 $100 vouchers among 35,000 participants that would not entail the refocusing of so much valuable mental productivity away from other important economic activities. It is unworthy of Sparkfun.com to create a condition of net wasted X man-years among the 97% of those who got no benefit from their participation in the stress test of your servers. I implore Sparkfun.com to be environmentally and socially more responsible with the next giveaway event.
May I also point out that there is very low number (my S.W.A.G. is 1%) among those who benefited from the vouchers who will even have the desire to document and share their projects. It seems to me that the way to get more projects shared would be to reward those who submit complete documentation that is usable by others, IMHO. 73

i would like to thank my mom and my sister for spending close to 2 hours on Sparkfun trying to get me stuff while i was at school. They were taking shifts so they could eat and take restroom brakes. After not being able to get on after 45 min or so my mom started calling the neighbors to see if they could get on. What a great mom! Unfortunatly I wasn't able to get any free stuff from Sparkfun on freeday. But that's okay because i enjoy spending my allowence at sparkfun.

Lucky customer from Texas here. It took me about 45 minutes to get thru, with about 200 reloads per page. (Well, maybe not 200, but certainly a lot.) I have co-workers who were also trying to get thru, some of them did, some gave up early. None of us were expecting to be able to get thru at all, so I was pleasantly surprised.
I am NOT surprised at the negative comments here, mostly from the young folks who think they are somehow more deserving than the other 168,097 people who tried and could not make it. I know too many younglings who think the world revolves around them, and that everything should be handed to them on a silver platter (or in a free red box.) Perhaps they will someday learn to accept things with dignity and grace.
Thanks Sparkfun! Keep up the great work!

It was good, guys, but of course disappointing that I didn't get my order through. I've placed a few small orders to SparkFun before, and will continue to! You guys are still one of the best DIY sites on the web because of how much you really care about the community by sharing so much knowledge with us. So, thanks for that.
I'm really sorry to hear that some people decided to misuse free day and try to profit off of it... it's sad that a lot of the stuff didn't make it into the hands of people who could really use it imaginatively. Oh, well... guess we can't do much about that! Maybe some of those people will get the parts and actually decide that they're cool enough to play with!

Loved the idea, but hated how widely distributed this was, it could've been a little more secretive. Its bad enough that websites (Hackaday) had it, but even the computer science forum at my university (carleton university) had a topic on this. Great for publicity for Sparkfun, but bad for starving students like me. I tried for at least an hour to even get on to Sparkfun and I could not even get the page to load. Great idea, a little sad i could not even try to get anything :(

Sparkfun staff,
I am so thankful that you had a free day, I got the intermediate tool kit which I needed for school (and for my own projects) And I got the clockit for fun. But my teacher said we need to get our own soldering and debugging tools, and after paying for school I have so little left. I can not afford to get any food more expensive that Ramen noodles, or hot dogs made from who knows what. But this sale made it possible for me to get the supplies I needed for my education.
So from now on when ever I need a part, I would normally get it from a different website (Hint it starts with 'D') but from now on I will buy my parts from you, because I am so thankful for your generosity and your way of thinking.
As a gift for your free day generosity, I give you a lifetime patron to your website. And I am advertising everywhere I can for sparkfun.com now (on gmail and facebook status).
I hope that free day will happen again in the future...
Thank you,
masselir

Merci beaucoup guys, I was among the lucky 16 from France ^^ !
Best wishes for the new year

While I think Freeday could have been planned for a little bit better, it at least gave me something to do in my Materials class (also known as kill my F5 key). I didn't get anything, but i guess it all just boils down to luck.
One thing I definitely agree on though is that I think next time it should just be a random day with maybe a 1 day announcement. A friend of mine, who has no electronic experience, found out about it on fatwallet and at that point I knew there as very little chance of getting anything.
Overall though, Good job on the freeday Sparkfun, it is nice to see companies give back to the community.

I was disapointed, tried for 2 hours to log in. The main page at about 1-1/2 was still reporting $30,000 out the door.

You guys probably did a nice job getting your servers ready but you failed miserably in your choice of ISP. I tried all day, finally got through once and the minute I went to place an item in my checkout basket, poof, connection reset.
If you ever do this again I think you might want to go with someone other than Rockynet.

Nice recap, just how I like them (full of graphs and pictures)
Free day was fun, even though i didn't try to get one of those free giveaways (i didn't even visit your site during the chaos). Just thinking of the mayhem you will cause was enough for me ;)
thanks.

...so only one person in Greece got in. I could have been the second one. Oh well. I knew I could never make it through all of that traffic. I hope that some of the free stuff went to people who actually needed it, because I know I didn't. Kudos Sparkfun for making these people happy!

This day was so cool, I really couldn't afford the parts for my arduinome but free day helped me do it! Can't wait to put it all together. I will be making a build log on my blog with photos and everything, so excited1 Sparkfun I love you :)

Damn this sucked for me, had the cart prepared and logged in beforehand and was ready for the second it started. Got at the way up to checkout, but just kept timing out until it finally loaded the page that said the giveaway was over.
Pure luck on your connection I guess because I was there from start to finish refreshing constantly trying to place my order for the first time on this site.
I remember there would be an occasional page that would refresh and show it halfway or updating. One refresh brought up the site as an all text no pics so that was one good idea they implemented in the mayhem.
Anyway, in the meantime, Futurelec, a very good company that is well known and reliable with cheap prices on popular components should be on everyones list as a main electronic supplier during this slow period.

Free Day was definitely a frustrating ordeal, but I was able to get some much-needed sensors for the project that I'm working on. I'd only ordered from SparkFun once before, but the simple fact that y'all would attempt something like this has made me a customer for life. Thank you so much for the new toys!
Mike

Thank you Sparkfun!
I didn't get anything from France, even hitting F5 for at least 2 hours (even when increasing FF timeouts)!
I really think that geography on the network was the key.
Don't bother too much about complaints: only the people who didn't make it will complain, you will never hear about the others!
Netx time, you will have to think of a better way to reward your customers

Annoyed I didnt get through, and that some people are re-selling the bits. Hopefully some of them are poor students and will use the money they make to buy much needed books/beer.
But then my project is just something I fancy doing, not something I need to do. Waiting for the Free Day did give me the chance to refine my choices, so maybe I will wait till the next one and by then I will have the ideal list

I can't believe I got through - thank you guys!
My two PicAxe chips + DS18B20 temperature sensors are going into automating the air vents in our house, hopefully saving hundreds every month in energy costs.
The LCD screen will go on the controller board for my homemade aeroponics tank, which is already producing tomatoes and helping to clean the planet's air.
The hall effect sensors will be used to replace the reed-switch design in a keyboard I made to withstand the heavy wear and tear of producing Braille material for the blind.
The Arduino USB board will be used to program Atmega 168 chips, which I will use to turn a set of broken toys into a programmable robot lab for a local elementary school.
I know you're getting a lot of flak here, but I want you all to know that these parts will be used well to help children learn, the disabled read, and make a significant dent in one household's carbon footprint.

It's nice to see this picture with a lot of young people smiling. Makes me remember myself back in school 14 years ago... :)
Hey, who cares who won and who didn't and who wants to resell it... I had to be far for my monitor most of the FreeDay time and later I couldn't make through, so I won nothing, but it was a lot of adrenalin and a lot of fun, and Sparkfun is awesome!
Good luck to all of you guys, doing great job!

Talk about frustrating, I had my order planned down to the last component. I didn't have anything major, a couple of experimental parts and a couple of necessities. Right when the counter hit 00:00:00, I tried to check out and didn't see SF again until around 11:00.
Was I pssed? Heck yeah, it sucks to not get anything - when so many others are. Especially when there is an element that is buying $100.00 worth of products to resell.
Am I gonna blacklist SFE? HLL NO! Because, even though I personally didn't get anything for free - there are plenty of others (that will actually use the parts) that are gonna get their first chance to make something that they couldn't afford before.
Despite the fact that I had my order planned for about a a week prior to Free Day - and ended up buying the necessities at regular price, I have to commend SF for giving back!
Don't be mad at SF, be mad at the freeloaders and opportunists that clogged the pipes to make a buck off of SF's generosity!

I have to admit, even tho I didn't get my order in I still had fun. I would like to thank Sparkfun for doing this too, not alot of companys give away 100,000 for free.

I didn't get my order in but this was definitely a lot of fun. Just the expectation you've created was great. Congratulations Sparkfun! You'll have a great 2010 also!

Didn't get in, but I did try for two hours.
Had a fair amount of fun, and actually learned a bit more about the internet.
As a broke college student, a gadgeteer, and amateur hack-n-basher, I wanted to say thanks to you folks. I've been reading message boards all day, and I really hope you listen to the praise, and discount the people who are hating on you right now. I wish I could have gotten some free loot, but I really appreciate the innovative way you gave it out (sorry, but this DDoS lottery was kind of a neat phenomenon to be a part of).
Stock your shelves back up, when the student loans start coming in, I need to get some parts. Thank you.
PS: If it ever comes down to it, I'd be happy to review organizations requests for tech assistance. It would be a great project to help me learn more about this great hobby/educational tool.

I understand that this giveaway was more aimed at the business end - get people interested in the site and such.
However, I think the best thing to do would, of course after you guys make it back into some black numbers, make a new, similar promotion (perhaps at not so large a scale), limited to those of us stuck in high school or college.
Timeouts have gained a whole new terrible meaning because of today ;)

"Cognitive dissonance" sums up my Free-day experience. I love the concept, I praise the philanthropic gesture, but 2 hours worth of refresh frustration just left me feeling aggravated. And truth be told, I can afford to pay for my own proto-goodies. So, Free-day and I had a love-hate relationship, but now it's over... I guess it wasn't meant to be.

I didn't get past payment confirmation - not a big deal, I expected total madness.
My advice for the future event: offer a deep discount (50% to 75% on everything), but not freebies. It will keep away random people who will resell their freebies on eBay.

A washed up company trying extort money from the new kid on the block.
The most retarted lawyer move -eva.

Just to throw in my 2c...
For me, it was a waste of time. It was also fun. I did spend several hours patiently waiting for a cart to move and hitting refresh, but that time wasn't taken away from anything critical.
I didn't get my stuff, but I will probably make a purchase of around $60 next time I feel like spending money. I honestly didn't realize all the cool stuff on this site. I've never purchased from here before, but I've worked with teams who've purchased parts from here, and have been considering a purchase for some time. So in my case, the marketing/advertising aspect is a success.
Yes there's some people who buy just to re-sell stuff, or who may buy stuff they're going to end up not using. But I think that on the whole, most people who got stuff are the intended recipients- new customers trying to start projects or previous customers getting a thank-you gift.
Thanks for the effort SparkFun!

So, can we expect to see the Sparkfun servers featured for sale in the "Dings and Dents" category soon?
Even though my order didn't go through, I think this was an amazing offer. You guys should consider hosting your site or parts of it in the cloud (Amazon EC2, images in S3, comments in simpledb, use CloudFront to host content closer to the users, etc.)
Let's do it again next year!

Like most here, I am annoyed I didn't get anything, especially as I have bought things before but really we can't complain too much, none of us lost out (with the exception of an hour and a half of refreshing) but as people have said, if you choose to do this again, make it for those who have ordered before and make it a massive discount rather than a free $100, therefore it's more about people who want to use this stuff, not sell it on. (Oh I was gutted that the confirm page finally loaded at 1h 47m sigh)
That said, I now only have one choice, I'll just buy the $100 cart I intended to get for free :D

I liked the concept, but there was one big problem. There were too many people who don't appreciate do-it-yourself electronics. It's not that I didn't "win", not that I wasted hours of my life building the perfect cart and F5'ing, just that people that don't deserve the opportunity beat me.
You need to make the products worthless for reselling. For example, engrave something on them. It could be the buyer's SparkFun account name, their password, or their billing address. Maybe cause some cosmetic damage to the parts. Regardless, people who want to make projects shouldn't care.
What do you guys think? I would love to see it happen again without all the people that don't know even know what solder is.
I was hoping to get stuff that I'll never pay for. Some things would just be cool to play with, but I can't justify the cost. I'm ordering a bunch of components anyway, from whatever the cheapest reliable seller is. The GPS module won't be on the list though.
Thanks guys, the atmosphere really was fun (especially the day before Free Day, hehe).

Firstly, thank you for free day.
Secondly, please don't use gray text on a white background. How can you be so nice as to give hardware away, but then so mean on my eyes?

NStoney: Think about it... microprocessors are like drugs for nerds; Once they get a taste, they only want more & more!
So says my PIC development board. And my homebuilt 4000+ point breadboard with ATMega328s all over it. And the AVRICE mark-two on my desk. And the copies of MikroPascal, WinAVR, AVR Studio, etc. etc. etc. on my computer.
uCs are geek crack. Stay away, lest ye be hooked!

congrats to this promotion. tho i didn't get any order through, i wasn't really surprised. i had no expectations. it was fun to watch the icr channel explode, the twitter search going nuts and you climbing the google trends.
i think most of all you have proven that the "Free" concept works. You might have given away 100K USD wort of stuff. but in return you got so much exposure and brand recognition worth millions of dollars in advertising. This will be a textbook example of good internet viral marketing.
I guess 2010 will be a massive year for you. you have just became (internet) world reknown. congratulations.
also nice to see many first time arduino and electronics user.

Hey I can log in now! Well I was one of the 1 million or so who couldn't earlier but that's ok. The whole thing was fun. Way to go Sparkfun! Keep up the good work and maybe you'll do it again someday. I'll be here if you do. Now to deal with my cart that's still waiting. Hum...

just wanted to say thanks for the free day! as a first time customer i def will be ordering more from sparkfun in the future :D i ended w/things that i actually wanted and was planning on buying a mth or 2 down the road and for that i will always give sparkfun my future orders when price differences are negligible.

2?
- people reselling on e-bay are sociopaths.
- free day would have been over in seconds if servers had been infinitely fast: expect to lose either way.
- brilliant advertising
- Will you guys make enough money in the next week to cover free day, by virtue of people who didn't get the discount placing smaller orders ?
- Sounds like you should see if you can fund a small sponsoring program for poor college students ( submit schematics, cartoons, get X dollars in Free ? )
- got in at the end (10:44). I was watching the little progress bar advance the whole time wholly expecting disaster. I will now be able to make a prototype for a new do-it-yourself. I usually dumpster parts, and I am grateful for this (less bleeding and snow involved, (besides, where am I going to get a boost converter in the trash (though I did find a nice little MIDI board the other day))?).
- Free day went exactly as expected and exactly as advertised. It is unfortunate that some people had higher expectations that were dashed.
/2?

Success? I can't speak for Sparkfun as a company but from a user experience it was a disaster. Seems like the idea was barely thought through. I mean lets look at this from a realistic point of view. Sparkfun is a business, not your friend. Every decision is motivated by money and the bottom line. "Free Day" would not have taken place if it didn't benefit Sparkfun. There are much SMARTER ways of "giving" back. I'm sure there are plenty of schools / clubs that would have loved to get some free hardware and would have actually used it and not put it up on ebay. I personally would rather have seen a nice blog post about how Sparkfun helped out some schools that teach electronics and then a follow up on the projects the built and the kids affected.
My point is treat it for what it is, a big publicity stunt that may or may not pay off.

What a hoot! The IRC channel was insane.
I liked the stats. I would like to see some stats about people like me. I purchased about half an hour after it ended. I clicked refresh for about half an hour, and then went to lunch (east coast). I did not get the free $100, but I ordered anyway.
I did drop 2 things from my cart, but that was because I still intend on donating $100 to the local Humane Society in the name of SparkFun.
Good Job folks; you rock.

I waited weeks for this. Weeks. This is the one thing I looked forward to before I leave for bootcamp. But even with the dual fiber optic T3 lines going into my house, your servers preformed like spark. It's not all bad though, I did manage to get a login screen this morning, after waiting for an hour an a half. Thanks Sparkfun!

Thanks Sparkfun! I'm sort of new to using microcontrollers and freeday gave me a great opportunity to get some essential tools for getting started.
Also, this was a pretty brilliant way of spending 100k. You got a huge amount of interest, performed the ultimate stress test on your server, and, best of all, made 1,035 people very happy.

I forgot:
4.) Give every one who posted here a little gift on their next order. The will stop whining. Also they are the people who really care about you and won't resell.
Are there really resellers? It's just sad an plain stupid.

Well I was up until 5am for nothing. I understand that it was free stuff but even so it was extremely frustrating, especially when my brother got his order (after I was the one that told him about it) and I didn't.
I think they definitely should have made the offer available only to customers who had previously purchased something from them (perhaps over a certain value or before the announcement was made) because the whole deal was ruined by leaches from those big deal websites and a lot of actual customers were left struggling in vain.

you made 1000 people happy, and many thousands completely mad with frustration, loosing hours clicking refresh again and again for nothing.
Next time, please make a lottery, at least we won't have to spend hours for nothing clicking refresh every 30 sec.
bah.

I wonder if the servers had been fast enough to handle all browser requests immediately, how long this would lasted? Perhaps less than a minute for 1000 people to make that final click, in which case everyone else would have been quickly disappointed.
I called in after 20 minutes to see if it was still going, and to my surprise it was. Basically this was a kind of lottery. I got mine after 40 minutes of mouse clicking. The slow servers made it more of a winnable challenge. I hope Sparkfun nets an eventual positive on this due to publicity.

This write-up is a little too sensitive to the complainers. This was promoted as a contest, and it generally worked out to be a fair game. I suspect that much of the negative energy is coming from the fact that the non-winner experience was to endure almost two hours of a broken web application, one of the more unpleasant experiences you can have on the web. As in, "Watch this video to the end before the time runs out and win a prize!" followed by two hours of "Buffering..."
Assuming the slow load times were anticipated, and I'm not sure they were given previous write-ups about the new servers, there might be fewer complainers if the potential experience ("you'll have to sit and hit reload quite a bit") were explained up front. Back in the day, people understood that "the first 10 callers" contests involved a lot of busy signals and redialing, but only after they played a few.
No doubt the length and engagement level of the event made it quite sticky from a PR perspective--and sincere kudos for that--but a better game would have a more positive non-winner experience.

Yeah, I wasn't able to get my order in but I still ponied up the 100+ bucks anyway. IE6 stops refreshing after 5 or 6 tries, that is including re-entering the address and pressing F5. I was hoping to leverage my work's network connection but to no avail.

thanks for posting the recap and all that stats. Getting to see behind the scenes. You guys should sell those F5 replacement keys!

I didn't get any free goodies.. but I had fun trying. Thanks for the promotion, and don't pay any mind to the people complaining about what you did or didn't do.

I think my favorite comment from the twitter stream was from someone who noticed all the hubub, but clearly didn't know what it was all about, asking "wtf is a @sparkfun and why do you want it so bad?"

I got all the way through the check out process, did the paypal payment and it forwarded back to sparkfun to tell me the order was complete but it didnt say that. It just went back to the last page of the check out again. I freakin paid and the order didn't go through. By that point it was around $96k so I went through the whole paypal payment AGAIN and it once again threw me back to the main page but then said "Free day is over". So way to go sparkfun IT. Go back to hot wiring Speak and Spells and stay the hell away from servers. PS I sent your customer support people screen shots of the BS. That order was PLACED. Absolutely no reason it could not have gone through at that point other than a MAJOR F'up on your end. And you want to know why I'm so pissed? I lost my job and have a senior design project to complete, now with no components.

Was really disappointed in the whole affair. Granted, yes, it's free stuff, can't really complain too much; it's not like they HAD to do it. I had an order ready to place this morning while I was in class (the wife sent it in for me), and she got to the page saying I qualified for the freeday promotion, and then most of the time it would just time out. The only time it DID go any further, it returned a blank page.
An idea for next time? (if you ever do this again) Have a special off-site page, where the first 1000 people to login with SparkFun user names get a $100 discount code for use at checkout. A unique, one-time use number, usable on any order, say, from 24-72 hours later ONLY. That lessens the loading on the server for anyone who is willing to PAY for orders, and it also helps to reduce overall delays and traffic issues.
Not having gotten the $100 just means it's going to be quite some time before I can afford to start on any of the exotic projects I had in mind. Congratulations to those who DID get through...anyone who is planning to resell their free stuff to make a quick buck? You're a loser.

SparkFun , by doing it this way, to everyone you are not promoting the hobby or your sales all that much as a LOT of those orders are from people who have no interest in electronics and are just going to post the stuff on ebay as soon as they get it. A guy at work today was trying to do this very thing, he doesnt even know what the word electrinc means, he just wanted free stuff to sell on ebay, like a lot of the people who got it will do.
Should have just offered free shipping or a 25% off coupon or something for everyone. At least that way people who were really gonna use the stuff would have gotten it.

The fact that your server lasted the 1.75 hours during that insanity is an achievement in itself. Congrats.
I as amazed that I even got some pages to load. Almost got to the end too. Oh well, it was fun playing.
Thanks, it was one of the best web events I've seen in a while.

My shopping cart remains as it was last night :/
I was mad, but then I read on and realized I was by far NOT the only one.
Think you could maybe have free day once a month? :P

Outstanding ALL THE WAY AROUND!!!
Over on the piclist forum there is an incredible amount of wanking about not getting FREE STUFF. And most of those doing the wanking are people with good paying jobs. Well, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, wankers!
This major 'give back' to the community was top notch. I hope Sparkfun reaps many benefits. I'm a long time customer and enjoy getting access to amazing amounts of amazing stuff. I ESPECIALLY like that they post schematics of almost everything they sell.
For the record: I did not participate as I can well afford these toys.

Hey,
My order is going to DigiKey or Mouser for this time.
I'm frustrated but that's not the reason ... I won't wait for more than 1000 to be packed before my order is prepared.
After things come back to normal situation, I'll be back for next orders.
Best regards.

Also, I just looked at something else. It seems a LOT of product in there store is still there, and at the same levels it was before this started. Take for instance the Olimex 40pin PIC dev board with USB that comes with a 4550. This is a very popular chip right now, and to see it at the same stock status as it was before this is kind of fishy. Out of over 1000 orders and $100,000 spent not a single person bought this board.
It seems after $100,000, their store should be almost totally empty on stock cuz I dont think they had that much $$ in stock listed on their site anyway at least not the popular stuff people want.

I'm in Georgia, USA. I couldn't get in at all. I had my daughter in Fort Worth, TX, working for me. Didn't quite make it, but had a blast trying. Lost absolutely nothing and had fun! Thanks!

Thanks Sparkfun, I had a good time trying for this, and I was happy to be one of the successful few. I look forward to playing with my new toys when they arrive; I hope this was successful from a philanthropic, marketing, and IT standpoint. Cheers.

I agree it was torture. Wasn't able to get to my cart, but appreciate the gesture to help out the community. It was kind to say the least. Now that i can access the site i will be putting in BO's for a couple things i need for my project.
Dragonfli I agree it is sad that people are going to resell some of the items.

I'm one of the frustrated people who couldn't get in and tried from 2 completely different networks. It only means it'll take a little longer to get my project going.
Congratulations!

I was so sad when I was trying to get my order in. I told all my friends about it (my brother skipped class) and then none of us got an order.
What a frustrating experience and I'm so embarrassed that I told so many people and then nothing worked out for them.

whoo! first comment...
I was at it for two hours from multiple locations and was stuck at the VERY last step before the 100,000 were gone... sigh.

I didn't get anything this time, but I am curious; will there be another one next year?

do you have plans for Free Day next year?

My take on this is that Free Day was possible because of old and loyal customers. So sparkfun used money it earned from us to fund freebies for new customers who may never take to Sparkfun as we did. I feel cheated to have sponsored these free loaders. I agree that once I have made a payment, the money is not mine to say. But then Why is Sparkfun saying that its paying back. This is a marketing ploy by sparkfun for sure but I think it has done more harm than good. I have not shopped from Sparkfun since the day and I doubt I ever will unless there is no option.

murphy: _ It was an easy buck with the right sniping software or scripts._
I am so disgusted that script-kiddies came to rob us! so, where is the map of showing where most of these packages went to. call the national enquirer. I want to know. :D

Congratulations for surviving the FreeDay onslaught of online traffic.
However, here is another perspective on the IT statistics
1035 orders in 105 mins
==> Only one order successful processed approximately every 6 seconds.
Given that may people (myself included) had their shopping carts pre-loaded prior to the start of the event...
This is a less flattering stat, and suggests that there are opportunities to improve system performance -- especially if another FreeDay is to be planned.

Great job, Sparkfun!! Even though I had no delusions of actually getting my order thru, it was the "thrill of the hunt" that was enjoyable!!
Let the whiner's whine.. you can't make everybody happy!!
Now, however, I do have a complaint.. I have suffered carpal tunnel syndrome in several fingers from hitting F5 so often and am now incapacitated and unable to work... my lawyers will be contacting you shortly.. (just kidding.. couldn't resist!)
About the F5 keys, however; it would be great if you produced a number of F5 replacement keys with the Sparkfun logo on them.. I know I'd grab a few (free or not!!)
Again.. great job and hope to see it again next year!!

The "bizzare form of nerd torture" is not over. My shopping cart had been full for 6 months(since immediately after my last order) waiting till I could afford these wonderful gizmos. I was up all night before free day unable to sleep from excitement, one of the masses in the #sparkfun channel. I hit F5 only every 2 minutes so as to avoid unnecessarily straining the server while staying in the hunt. For the first time, checkout screen appears. I click "try for free day". Blank page, F5F5F5F5, too late. Place my order anyway, rent can wait this month. Today I come home from school and check the tracking #. Yaaaay! I have a lovely picture of the red box sitting in my apartment's mailbox. Unfortunately that is all I have because it is wedged so tightly behind the lip at the opening of the box that I can't get it out. AAARGH! So close yet so far away.

Yay, my Free Day box showed up today. Thanks, Sparkfun!
I've already got the Lilypad up and running, and am on my way to figuring out how to get the Bluetooth Mate attached to it to talk to me. I'll try to post a howto once I get everything working..
Thanks again!

I tried to read through the posts but too many of them are complaints about not getting something that wasn't promised to you.
I'm relatively new to SparkFun (one previous order), and was hoping to stock up on somethings for some project ideas that I have. I didn't 'win' any of the Free-Day money, but still place a smaller order for some parts!
Congrats to all who did win, I hope the parts will go to good use and more/new tutorials are generated as a result!
;-> (cjh)

so I woke up early to wait in line on sparkfun at 9 am only to find out that the bidding didn't begin at 9 AM Eastern.... ouch. Waiting for hours I had time to get my cart ready, but reluctantly couldn't get my cart to load so I could check out. After the 100k went, I submitted my order and paid the $100 myself because after waiting for months for free day, I couldn't let it turn into a nothing day. Alas my order was not free, but use my money to get a bigger server, and have a bigger free day!!!! maybe even a free week?? ehh????

I guess I'll had to whatever has already been said. I have been a SF customer for several years now. I had filled my cart well before FD and was waiting for that final hour.
As you said, "we want to get back to the community" so I was patiently waiting to get my free stuff.
I didn't get anything, though I tried hard. I kept getting blank pages. Of course I'm annoyed. I'm part of the first few customers of SF and from what I understand people just showed up on that specific day to grab free stuff, while I didn't get anything.
Now to me this looks like more an advertisement stunt than thanking the community. If you really want to give back to the community you shouldn't allow newer accounts to benefit from free day, or have a pro-rata based on the how long people have been registered user. Also, provide a longer window to allow most people to get to your site.
My cart is still full, I have no plans to check it out because I would feel used if I were to do so.

What Svalebror said.

I love you, Sparkfun. I didn't get free stuff, but placed my order anyway a little later in the day. Now I wish you had a progress bar for the backlog. How far behind are you, and when do you expect to catch up?

The whole F5 key thing is actually quite sad.
Lots of people pressing F5 which is the exact WRONG thing to do to get to the next page. F5 reloads the current page, not the next page that you want to get to.
The correct approach, used by the people who actually got free stuff, was to click the relevant button for getting to the next page, eg cart/checkout.
95% of the time it wouldn't load. So you had to click the browser 'stop' button and click the cart/checkout button again and keep repeating that many times until you got to the next page. Then you could move on doing the same with the next page until you finally finished the order.
F5 was only useful at the very start for getting the sparkfun main page to load. Once you got it loaded ya never needed to press F5 again, you just kept pressing the button to get to the next step.

Great publicity stunt, Spark Fun! Like most people, I wasn't one of the lucky ones, though not for lack of trying.
My shopping cart is still full - and I was just thinking - it would probably only take a discount offered to me to make me complete the purchase.
Offer a 20% discount to all those who had non-empty shopping carts on the free day but missed out, and you'd probably generate another huge round of publicity, without it impacting on your bottom line too badly.
I know I for one would complete the transaction if I got that offer ;-)

Free Day didn't work for me. I am an SF customer. I was all set to order my stuff. Then I spent two hours getting blank pages. By then I had gotten really frustrated and realized that my time was worth more than the free stuff.
I know you wanted to attract new customers, but the reality is that free distorts the economics too much. If you make something free, people will grab a handful just because it's free, not because they actually wanted or needed whatever you were offering.
I do applaud your goal of giving back, but perhaps next time (assuming there is a next time) you should do something like 50% off for a day, or random orders are made free. Either of those would still be a big win for people who really want the products, but would discourage the people who are getting it just because it's free.

I tried in vain to be one of the twenty-seven lucky UK recipients of $100 of free goodies, but it wasn't to be. However, I did place a smaller order the next day and it is already in the UK for delivery sometime on Tuesday! So much for the staff being overwhelmed with orders etc, either that or some have been working overtime.
Great idea, but don't let the thought that anything ordered since won't arrive for weeks put you off from placing an order!

For me it was a dissapointment..
I was able to checkout three times but didn't get in time to payment page. Could you guys give a small discount to the people would tried hard but didn't have any luck?
That could make me buy those things! :)
Also perhaps another idea for a future free day (I hope SF grows so hard after freeday that another server cluster is necessary :p) is to let people post idea's of future projects. The best idea's, voted by other customers, get the free things.

Free Day was great fun! - No, I didn't get anything and Yes, I tried. For the whiners, it's like playing the lottery with better odds, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
For the students that could use the free parts, organize a group and have a fundraiser.
As suggested in many electronic forums, ask for free samples from semiconductor manufacturers. You may not get the exact parts you want, so you may have to use some creativity in your design. Thats part of the fun of being a good engineer!

I?m in the UK. I spent over 2 hours continuously failing to login. I have a good broadband connection and figured I had as much chance as anyone else. Congrats to the lucky 1000. I wonder how many of them live outside the USA?
I suppose it was inevitable that the servers would instantly overload. Anyhow, credit to SparcFun for the big giveaway. I guess those servers are marked ?tested? now :)

hmm that last image has a small mistake in it if you are going to trip some one up with a skate board you need to put it the right way up so they slide away giving you time to escape other wise they will just get up and chase you.

I am glad atleast some got something they needed.
The shutdown at 8am kicked me and the others I know in Norway off the server and we could never log back in so that ended our chances. Noticing now that not a single order came from Norway is no surprise.
I do agree with those suggesting that there should have been more of a reseller/freeloader-deterrent in the offer. That would have curbed the traffic a bit and allowed anyone to complete their order regardless of distance to server or bottleneck of connection. If it then turned out to be free, they'd be very happy. Otherwise atleast they wouldn't have wasted 2 hours without even getting a normal order in.
I just hope I'll atleast get my last order that was supposedly shipped the 10'th december. So far it's looking bleek. (Stupid x-mas mail probably clogging up the works!)

It was frustrating not being able to get in with the site mostly down during the contest... But I ended up ordering later in the day.
I think Amazon may have a better approach with their Lightning deals and deal of the day. I think a lot of traffic would be generated by people coming in to see what happens to be on sale each day...
Hint: 50% off on an Arduino Mega would be a good one to start with :-)

I really (really really really)needed 4 120VAC 30A relays and was going to try to snag them, but I could not even get on the Sparkfun webpage inbetween 11 and 1!

Thanks, sparkfun! i got a monocle, an arduino and a green laser. I'll be making a robot using the laser and a gameboy camera for rudimentary machine vision, with an arduino brain.

This is a small company doing what it wants, and I commend them on following up on the offer. I dare not say it was not a hard day. I even took two hours off (paid) so I could try and get in on this deal and guess what? I did. I got what I wanted and even spent a bit more than the free amount. I am not a new customer to SF and even if I had not got what I wanted I would not away from using them again. In the end SF has great products, some you can't get any place else, and for most if this keeps you from supporting a great company like SF then it is truly your loss.

It was a big sparking disappointment. I have no money and needed those bits badly for a university project. The deadline is soon and I cannot buy the stuff I need. I was ready and tried to pay right when it started but the site was useless. I've always preferred Sparkfun to British online shops. Well, not anyomore. Good bye Sparkfun!

I'm not sure of you have succeeded in "giving back". In that case Free Day should have been an event for existing customers, organized in such a way that your customers do not have to waste several hours in front of their computers, only to be left with disappointment. I think you have mainly succeeded in having people create an account. But I guess that makes you just as happy, if not happier.

Free day is an amazing idea.
Congratulations and Kudos on this successful event.
But I think it could have been more fair, looking at the numbers/orders per country. I'm european and F5 just didn't do it for me...
Why not customers only? That way also probably a lot less stuff would be winding up on ebay. If that is the case anyway.
I decided to go ahead and order my $100 cart anyway.
Next month when I have enough money again :)

I wonder if those stats are counting all the thousands of hits they got that never got a response in any way shape or form. Should they count?

As the only Mexican customer who was lucky enough to place an order let me say in big capital letters and lots of exclamation marks: ??????THANK YOU SPARK FUN!!!!!! (the opening marks are free just for you pals, in the Spanish language we have plenty of them).
I am really amazed for your Free Day... it's uncommon to hear about a company giving away $100 with no restrictions at all... you are fantastic.
As a side note... you should give a special gift to the client who placed the highest order ($425.42)...who incidentally it's me :) (I have so much to explain to my wife); keep doing the great job you have done (and don't hear the silly-angry people that don't understand this was an opportunity of fun and celebration). Again: thank you so much.

C'mon guys... We are all engineers here! We were all stuck in the same electronic courses studying phasors and z-transforms! We were all stuck in the same classes with a 30:1 guy/girl ratio!
We have to stick together. We cant be getting mad at eachother (or sparkfun) for server timeouts. Im mad I didnt get anything either, but Im not about to take it out on fellow engineers/computer scientists.
Done.

In lieu of counting on these winnings, I work 20-30 hours a week in a lab while going to school so that I can afford to support my research. Its a small trade-off to pursue what's most important to me. If there's something you really want you have to go get it, never for a second feel entitled to the things you want.
And if your one of those stock brokers making bank off this economy of ours I hope you sponsor a few of us broke college students trying to make this world a better place.
P.S. Sparkfun doesn't like long posts.

Sparkfun could easily hire an intern panel to handle the sponsorship concept. Many college students would work for little more than some free stuff. If Sparkfun wants to give back to the community, it should give to those who are designing the future of science and technology, not the average joe sniper to pawn around to us.
The free day concept was huge, its a revolutionary marketing concept. If I had time I'd read that book Nate got the idea from. The author is clearly a genius.
I tried logging in the night before just to brows products and look for a few new sensors. LOL. I couldn't even get in. I started trying to log in at 8am Eastern and didn't get the main page to load until almost an hour after the kickoff and only $6500 had been claimed. When the login timed out, many times, I gave up and went back to work. An hour later I try logging back in and $99,500 was gone. Interesting.
It would have been cool to win something but honestly what can you expect. This is possibly the most disgustingly awesome viral marketing campaign in human history.

I have to admit, the concept of giving away $100k in free DIY electronics gear is awesome. Period. But I'm not without objections.
I'm also a student working on a few projects that would have benefited from this giveaway- and almost planned that I would be in the winnings.
The reality is that it was a no rules free for all where the entire internet came crashing down on Sparkfun. The sad thing is that a lot of gear is going to end up on eBay. The funny thing is this is how a lot of people operate. It was an easy buck with the right sniping software or scripts. Its like the people with the bidding software for eBay that snipe you 30 times in the last 3 seconds of the auction. Its like the major stock brokers moving their trading centers across the hall from wall street with a broadband data link to play the markets. This stuff happens.
A lot of people feel entitled to a free day for their hard work, support, and loyalty to businesses. Entitlement is the sad joke of the paternalism age, little more, little less.

I was completely unable to get any response from the site from the moment it all opened until about 3 hours after it had ended. :-(
I am not that upset (disappointed, sure)...I suppose I need a faster computer, or a faster broadband connection or both, still, this is the first time I have ever even heard of anything like this.

I just dumped and cleared everything in my cart. You thanked your IT staff for a day of chaos? In over four hours of trying, the page only loaded twice. That's just sloppy IT practice, guys, and your staff should be taught the basics of how to use a load balancer.
Or, better suggestion: Fire them for the terrible customer service we experienced yesterday!

russosv: Baloney. Try getting an FT232RL IC off of eBay. This site sells them lower than any other site on the web INCLUDING eBay. Maybe if you are buying LEDs or pin headers, but you definitely cant get everything cheaper on eBay.
http://tinyurl.com/y87qe2c
Sorry to pop your bubble, mate.

Even though I spent 30 minutes at home hitting F5 (and so did my 10 year old son) and another 45 minutes of hitting F5 at work, in the end it was good fun and the checked out page loaded 5 minutes after the 100K was gone. Thanks SparkFun!

Also, i must say, some people i heard(or maybe less) are saying that this benififted plenty of people, i'm not as optimistic. Sadly i would say probably 1-7% of the people who got free stuff, likely were freeloaders trying to get quick cash by reselling it. And for others saying that this was to be for the devoted, i got on when it had $15,000, and got through after it ended, having one of the best connections in my city possibly. This should have been thought out more, because of the fact some people who got it may never come back to even look at the site after they get there orders :(

Got my 9 DOF IMU today. Thank you SparkFun!
Alexei
Ontario, Canada

Amazing Free Day :). Even though I was not able to submit my order, I loved the fact that there was one.
Yes! I was frustrated at the site (NOT Loading) and then when my order had qualified, my browser crashing (damn Chrome), but I loved the spirit of the whole deal.

I'd like to say thanks to sparkfun for helping me, a broke college student, take my arduino projects to the next level. That WiFly shield is going to go to good use. I've visited sparkfun regularly for the past several months since I first learned about arduino. I've been impressed by the good nature and helpfulness of the community here, so I'm surprised and disappointed by alot of the negativity that's going around. You've made me a loyal sparkfun customer for life.

I wish you had a graph for browsers and a graph for browsers that completed orders. Just a curiosity over which browser handles timeouts better...

but pages loaded
No, they didn't. Especially for those who couldn't even get a TCP connection set up. You apparently have no clue how this Internet thing works.
And the fact that 80% of the giveaways went to US orderers also tells a story. Foreign Internet users couldn't get through, likely because your ISP has a piss-poor international Internet connection or maybe because you deliberately rate-limited them. For your foreign customers your pages didn't load at all. But since when did you care about your foreign customers at all.

First, THANK YOU SPARKFUN FOR FREEDAY even though it wasn't free for me. Yesterday was pretty frustrating...next time have a 1 page checkout. 20 minutes per page with all the timeouts just doesn't make for a fun experience. However, I got my order in and went through with it even though it wasn't free. It's stuff I need for projects anyway and I want to support a vendor with your customer service attitude.
thanks again, Jerry

I'd just heard of SparkFun from on freenode because of FreeDay. I learned of the Bus Pirate; and even had about $130 in cart.
FreeDay came, so -flood- for the site. As my first order, things of course went wrong. Suggestions:
1) Put an entire order, shipping methods, address, credit card info, and any constraints (like must get the up to $100 discount for freeday) in a single HTTP GET uri API.
2) A dry-run option for training and info validation (could be abused so only logged in account with logged attempts and some choke limit).
3) I reduced my order to core items, and noticed that I could have gone to a page that had #1's info but was part of the order process. Add a checkbox/entry 'Only Place order if at least $X could be free'; then just that final to next page transition could be hammered. It would also let potential customers get that page loaded up in the before FreeDay opened and then just retry one page.

I was one of the people refreshing like mad hoping for a piece of the pie, but I never got through. I'm very poor so $100 is ton of money for me. If you guys do this again in the future maybe there is some way to keep it to people who aren't just going to resell. Maybe people that have a few forum posts or throw in an electronics equation to qualify? Just some thoughts.
I hope make magazine and hack a day have a flurry of new projects because of this free day. Thank anyways for giving 1,000 very lucky people a shot at this instead of wasting money on tv commercials or something useless. good job guys.

Well thank you sparkfun for an awsome give away. I am crushed that it took 11 minutes too long for all the reloading, after two hours I had high hopes.
I have been wanting to start experimenting with microcontrollers for ages but can't afford to get started with them- this was a perfct chance and I'm sorry to have missed it.
My new resolution for the new year is to try and save up enough that I can place an order, it will just take longer than I would like

Alright!!!! I got my freeday stuff!!! Got it in less than 24h!! (23h 46min to be exact)
Due to the large volume of orders, I wasn't expecting that package for 2 weeks at least.

Spark fun thinks this was a success? The only thing they gave back to their community is hard feelings, sure they gave away 100K but I think they will loose in the end. If I were in charge of marketing and Heard "We can alienate 100,000 people in one day and make 1000 people happy at the same time" they would be out on the street. Their IT people are idiots if they think they came close to "staying up"...IDK... if I can find the items I need from another supplier, I am inclined to give my business to them, not SFE

Imagine my surprise today, a day after free day, when I tried to login and found the Spark Fun site slow. I tried to access my cart and got
"SparkFun Electronics is Temporarily Closed!
SparkFun Electronics has been temporarily closed while necessary upgrades are installed and configured.
Please be patient and check back soon. We're working tirelessly to make this down time as brief as possible."
My cart still has the items I was unsuccessful trying to get on Free Day, when I received a bogus message that my credit card number indicated my card was not an accepted card type (I used the same card at the site a couple of weeks earlier without problems, it's listed as a valid card type and I entered the number correctly because it went through just after the free day cut-off).
Now that I can't access my shopping cart at all, I'm getting the paranoid feeling Spark Fun doesn't want me to have these items. Oh well, maybe the site just isn't working as well as Spark Fun thinks it is. Sorry, guys, but that's what it looks like from here.