Yet another extended sale
Matt_Castle
Posts: 2,593
As much as I don't want the forums to be a pit of negativity complaining about one or other of Daz's practices, I really wish we stopped being told that sales are "Final day, buy, buy now!", only to be followed by "Well, gee whiz, we found an extra 24 hours in the spare store room, who would have guessed!?"
It seems more often that a sale doesn't end when advertised than it actually ends when it says. Indeed, with regards to today's extension, I could have called it last night that we'd get the extension - we had a day left in September after the weekend, and sales often delay an extra day or two if the end of the week/month is only a day or two later than the initial countdown.
As a rare event, it would be one thing, but when it's this frequent, we are regularly working with inaccurate information to inform our purchasing decisions.
This is particularly pertinent when the sales criteria remain the same for several days, such as they now have over the extended weekend, and customers' decision making has to consider tokens with a limited expiry date. For example, with the sales claiming they'd end on Sunday, and the lack of fresh releases on Saturday implying there would be no change in what was available until afted the sale ended, a perfectly reasonable purchasing strategy for someone who didn't need to buy in a rush would have been to wait until the claimed end date of Sunday to fill a cart, with the expectation that any earned tokens would last as long as possible to pick from the next set of new releases. However, such a customer would now have had a day crossed off those tokens' expiry compared to if Daz had actually reported the correct sale end date of Monday and they instead made their purchase then.
Even if we are in the circumstance where Daz have genuinely intended all of their reported end dates and their altering of their plans is inadvertent each and every time, we're still in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation that erodes trust between them as a seller and us as buyers.
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Comments
Gotta agree with all that.
I like it that Daz does this over the years on big sales. .. then again... my wallet suffers
I just want honesty and accuracy in ads.
Also, the number of tokens you get off of said purchase is half what you would've gotten waiting until Monday due to double token day.
I mean, that works decently for Daz as far as people not being able to get a larger discount = probably more money for them (maybe? hard to factor in the effect of "I'll buy more because I have more tokens"), but it's not a thing that's going to leave the customer with a pleasant taste in their mouth.
We've asked for and gotten ending time/date for flash sales and such, and I think people have universally liked that. However, this "final 24 hours" -- "no THIS is the final 24 hours!!" erodes trust. If you're going to make it three days, fine! Just say so! For sales like this one, particularly, there's really no reason that on Saturday it couldn't have been announced as "final three days!"... that would make sense given they were the last three days of the month, and it would've been *honest.*
Another effect you get is that maybe folks weren't so interested in the catch-up sale because they'd already done all the shopping they wanted for this one. So they're thinking -- okay, yeah, not interested, give it a pass, out with a whimper... I'll look forward to Monday. They log on Monday looking forward to some new releases, new gimmick, whatever, but --
NOPE! Second verse, same as the first!
It feels like getting the rug pulled out from under you.
...that extra 24 hours was apparently hiding right next to an entire extra week.
How do they get by with this? Obviously they know how many artists and products they have for the sale. Are we to believe that these extra things just unexpectedly showed up and they raced out to create new ads for them? As I said above, I want accuracy and honesty in ads.
And when I checked out just minutes before Daz midnight, it warned me that the prices would expire in a few minutes, which is not true if the sale is extended with prices presumably remaining the same. I didn't have any golden ticket items in my cart so all the prices should be the same today. Why did I get that warning?
You know how it is, you're cleaning up at the end of a sale and surprise, you find 5 (7 ?) PAs you forget in the storage room.
It's mainly linked to the 30 for 30 discount: it's valid for one day only and the alert system you're speaking about is only built to check if an active offer will end in less than an hour (at least some active offers: you won't get alert on LD as far as I remember).
But I didn't get a warning over the weekend. I checked Saturday night shortly before Daz midnight and saw no warning and I kept the items in my cart and they stayed the same price.
+1! However, I think it's quite nice to get a few extra Golden Tickets (hopefully one of Fabiana's will finally be included), and I also like the fact that items I like are so much cheaper thanks to the Frequent Byers discount... ;-)
+1 on all of this, it's really not a good marketing policy in terms of customer trust. Also, plain annoying. I'm done with this sale now, I've been done even since before the week end; can we please move on now?
it seems OK to me as long as I keep getting at least one LD I want each day at 92% off
I feel a need to ask, are people seriously wanting no sale at all as an alternative? There is NEW items in the store, seems a bit choosy beggarly...
Maybe daz marketing is trolling us? One never knows! At least I like JoLabs' weirdness. Let's see what else is in todays sales.
yeah, I think by the wording I was supposed to feel excitement and delight, not have my immediate reaction be disgust and "are you stinking kidding me??"
As Inigo Montoya said, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I find this baffling as well. We have it pretty good when we can complain about a pretty good sale that gets extended. Even during this sale I've been able to find at least one LD item that interests me, often for less than a dollar. Life is still good.
And then people complain when the sales aren't good enough or non-existent. I for one am happy it's extended because I have two new coupons from daz plus to use on this sale.
Gods damnit, I thought I was complaining about this being extended by a single day, not an entire week.
At no point has that been said, or will that be said.
What I want is that if we are told that a sale is about to change, we are correctly and accurately told when that will be, rather than constantly being fed false information.
Telling customers that a sale is about to end is something used as a marketing tactic; it tries to force their hand to make the purchase now, because it won't be available tomorrow... oh no, wait, it is available tomorrow.
I deliberately haven't even checked what US/Utah laws are around this kind of thing, because I know the forum has strict rules around legal talk or accusations and I want to avoid making any such assertions, but what I can confidently (and within the rules) say is that it erodes trust between us and Daz when we're firmly told one thing and then they do another.
There were not when I posted this last night. There in fact had not been since Friday.
I will also say that you are presenting this as if Daz's choices were between "Say they would end the sale on Sunday and then end the sale on Sunday" or "Say they would end the sale on Sunday, but actually end the sale on Monday". This is a false dichotomy that ignores "If they are going to end the sale on Monday, say they will end the sale on Monday."
I don't mind long sales. It's the fact I was told they were going to be short sales that I'm complaining about.
I correctly prophecied they'd extend it through Monday but that was because I assumed they'd want to start the Next Thing on 1 October. Today's extension was a surprise, and not a welcome one.
AND once again they misspelled a PA's handle on the carousel card.
Hopefully we at least get a DO bundle this Thursday.
I'm not bothered by it tbh.
If the two options are "be honest and have no sale" or "lie about it and have a sale" then yes, I would rather have the honesty.
However, there are more alternatives than the two you put forth as the only options, especially considering that Daz always has SOME sort of sale going.
And one of the options would certainly be "have the sale, but be honest and forthright about when it's ending." Seems to me THAT is what people are complaining most about.
Just curious why the end date of the sale is such a big deal. Are they allowed to change their minds about the end date or does it have to be an iron-clad thing? What if they change a few items, call it something different but pretty much use the same discounts and conditions, would that make a difference? I can understand frustration when the discounts glitch or there are inconsistent conditions, but I've never seen so much discussion about when a sale has to end. In other fields, people would be happy to be able to have extended time to enjoy a sale or discount. True, DAZ always seems to have some sort of minimal sale going, but few of them are as extensive and in some cases as deep as this one.
Being given inaccurate information interferes with purchasing strategies, particularly when sales frequently provide the best discounts for buying more, or there are discounts/coupons/tokens that can only be used on a single cart (or otherwise a limited number of times).
Depending on how sale end dates fall around days where money comes into or goes out of someone's budget, knowing that a sale is actually going to last two days longer, and not in just three hours, and they don't have to buy right now - that could easily be useful purchasing information to them. Perhaps they now know they can use their tokens a day or so later and add in those two extra items they wanted.
Telling people that a sale is about to end is a marketing tactic telling them they haven't got time to dwell on it, they've got to buy NOW. Backing out of that makes people feel they've been lied to (even if Daz themselves may indeed simply have changed their plans and no deceit was intended), particularly when it's done on a regular basis.
Actually a lot of the prices didn't stay the same because the Latest/recent/legacy selections changed. Last night I left a PA item (part of the 55% off selection) in my cart. Today it was full price, as were a lot of my wishlisted items that were discounted during the so-called final catch up.
I've contemplated this debate and I feel like I fall just over on the "whatev" side. I've been shopping here for years and I know that sometimes sales get extended and sometimes they don't. I've tossed the dice on letting a cart go past Daz-midnight and lost; I've wrapped up buying a cart late "today" and then missed out on something bigger/better/more "tomorrow". Basically, I have my own rules that I consider in those circumstances, based on a general price/discount range that I have for every* product in the store I would consider buying, recognizing only hard stops, like token expirations, as drop-dead situations. If tokens are expiring, and the prices are good, I buy, and I don't care that I missed out on something tomorrow. There's always another sale. If prices are eh, and the tokens carry over, I may take a gamble and shrug and dump the cart if I bet and lose. There's always another sale. (* I don't mean literally every individual thing, but I have an idea of what discount % I need to be prompted to buy various types of products.)
My mom - and I love my mom, so this is not a mom-bash - has been known to shop for things for months after she's bought the thing, presumably for the gut-kick that "I could've saved $1 if I'd waited..." I find that it's a lot healthier to say, do I need/want that thing? If yes, what is a fair price, today (or at some near-future day), for that thing? And then I shop around and buy that thing when it's at my price point. Or it doesn't come up at that price, and I don't buy it.
In regards to this particular sale, I would've bet the farm on it going over to Monday. I didn't predict an extra week. Either way, I had what I wanted already bought on Saturday. An extra week just means more unplanned opportunities for stuff that's actually at shockingly good prices. The Daz store obviously can't run monster sales every day of the year. Would it be great to have this sale and be 100% certain of when it ends? Sure, I guess. But given a choice of everyday pricing or another few days of this sale, I'd rather have the sale.
While I could understand some mid-week course changes if something isn't working, personally I find it hard to believe that on Friday night when everyone went home for the weekend, with the "last 48/24 hours" warnings running for the next two days, they didn't know that the sale that would start Monday at midnight would be an extension. And I don't often (ever?) see extensions happening when there's been some massive technical issues on their part that have negatively impacted a sale -- although occasionally other incentives kick in -- which makes me think the main pages themselves are planned a bit in advance. Hard to say whether the orange banners are pre-planned or not.
I mean... it's a marketing strategy and I have to think it's working for them or they wouldn't keep doing it. Maybe they honestly see it as a surprise gift to people who missed the deadline and not from the perspective that people could feel jerked around. And I'm sure they're going to keep doing whatever gives them the numbers they want... but personally I find it very distasteful.
(Edited because my bluetooth keyboard was being a turkey and I didn't catch it until after I hit post)
I think I'm going to spend a substantial amount in the store in the next 24 hours. ( or maybe this week, or maybe next week, or next month, or not at all, maybe ).
First off, I thank The Universe every day for where I have managed to scratch and claw my way up to in this world. At sixty, I actually have some disposable income, but I clearly remember a not-too-distant time when I didn't even have enough to get by between paydays. So, I get where some people have heartburn with these sales. A hobby can be a source of income, or purely outgoing cash, but hobbies also porvide other mental benefits and should not be taken for granted. Some people are literally deciding between making out like a bandit on the latest DAZ deal - EXPIRING TONIGHT! (or not) - and paying a bill on time. THAT's where some of their heartache is coming from. They just want to be able to depend on the information they have on hand to make important decisions with their money. It would be easy for me to lose track of those days for me and leave them far behind, but those memories keep me humble and appreciative of the things I am able to afford now.
Otherwise, personally, ANY SALE IS A GOOD SALE! I think in ten years of shopping at DAZ I have paid full price maybe three times! Life is good.
"So many artists we needed another week!", they say, after three straight days of no new releases.
We have a furniture store out here that had a "going out of business" sale that lasted a few years. They didn't go out of business after the sale.