As of 4pm about 400 people have succeeded in making sale purchases. Other customers have called the office for help and submitted problems by email. The load on our server has been so great that it crashed for awhile. Thanks for the great response!
Reminder: The sale is on in-stock items only.
Problems
- Those of you who did not complete the registration process before ordering did not see the 40% discount, but the office will fix all of those and refund to your credit card. (Part of the registration process requires replying to the email you get sent to verify your email address.) The process was amended at about 3:15pm and the problem should not occur after that time.
- Some people still using old versions of Internet Explorer (before version 8) have problems on the checkout screen explained in the green box at the top of that screen. It is server and internet load dependent and with today's load may be worse. The solution is to either upgrade to IE 8 or use any other browser. We believe the problem is fixed in the next version of the code that runs the web server but that is about a month away.
- A few of you have gotten a pink error box at the top of the screen about an error on line 561, etc. That seems to be transient and just trying again works.
- There are several issues with the shipping prices which will be looked into, but in the end it gets it right. The sale generated some large orders where our current shipping pricing computation may overcharge. We intend to change to a weight based rather than per item based computation in the next few months.
- The new Harriman book has not been sent to the printer yet. The sale is on in-stock items only.
- We did not change all the references to 10% and 25% discounts which do not apply during the sale. The 40% discount overrides all of them.
- For those of you buying multiple items, the easy way is to click on the Continue shopping button on the Cart page, or just hit the browser back button to go back to the page you just ordered from, e.g. books or maps.
- Good news for us, bad news for you. The Gunks map has run out and is now out of stock. We are well along in the reprint process but don't have an availability date yet.