Barnes & Noble Unprepared for Web Traffic in Wake of Robust NOOKcolor Sales
Despite comments from CEO William Lynch last month during the Q2 Barnes & Noble earnings call that sales of Nook e-readers and the digital content platform “may be greater than we originally thought in our one- to three-year models,” the company appeared unprepared Christmas Day for the onslaught of Web traffic as Nook recipients tried to redeem gift cards and order e-books. Lynch said in late November that NOOKcolor was selling through at twice initial projections. In a prepared statement upon shipping of the product in mid-November, the company said NOOKcolor had already become the best-selling product at Barnes & Noble, with pre-order volume “significantly beyond that of the company’s aggressive expectations.”
When we attempted to redeem Barnes & Noble gift cards and order e-books at numerous intervals between 2 p.m. and 10:45 p.m. on Christmas Day -- with apparently quite a few other Nook reader owners -- we experienced long waits with no resolution. Initial messages read: “We are sorry. Our system is temporarily unavailable due to routine maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience during this outage and expect our systems to return shortly. Thank you for your patience.” Later, attempts to download books elicited a “server too busy” message. Most frustrating of all were several shopping cart reminder e-mails we received during the afternoon about items sitting in our virtual shopping cart, which we could do nothing about. Included in the message was the warning, “Make sure you get what you want before it’s gone!"
A scan of the Nook Facebook page revealed other users having similar problems. One user said he couldn’t set up his account on Christmas Day because of a “server is busy” message. He followed that with, “Think they need to hire a new IT.” He wasn’t the only user with that thought. One said, “All you IT folks at Barnes-Noble…Can you say, “It’s time to hire some contractors!” Another user said, “It goes through the process until it connects to the Wi-Fi network, then it just stops. The continue setup button does not activate and it is stuck. Have turned off and back on several times and have the same problem each time.” A forgiving veteran Nook user said, “They had the same problem last year. Too many people with new Nooks trying to log on at once. Their servers just aren’t used to that kind of a rush.”
Finally, by 10:14 a.m. on Dec. 26, we were able to redeem the Barnes & Noble card and download books with only minimal delay. We did, however, continue to receive e-mails advising us about items in our virtual cart only to find none there. By contrast, we had no problems redeeming gift cards or downloading apps and music on the iTunes site on Christmas Day.
We sent an email to Jonathan Shar, general manager of digital content for Barnes & Noble, who forwarded our questions to the PR department. We asked if the site was indeed down for maintenance on Saturday and if they actually had scheduled maintenance for Christmas, why the website had problems, how many users had visited the bn.com website Christmas Day, how many Nooks have been sold, and which categories of content are selling best. In response, Mary Ellen Keating, senior vice president of corporate communications, apologized for the difficulty we had redeeming a card. She said, “I know we had some sporadic gift card redemption issues on Christmas Day that were immediately resolved,” citing “a lot of interest in our products.” She said NOOKcolor continues to be the company’s “best selling product ever” and promised more information and data “on or about Jan. 6” when the company issues its holiday sales data.