Free Day is Done The week has finally arrive - Free Day is this Thursday, January 7th, 2010! Favorited Favorite 0

Wow that was fast! Free Day is over. Over $100k was given away in just under 1 hour and 45 minutes. We had over 1,000 orders and nearly over 70,000 unique visitors. Our servers barely stayed up!



Thank you all for checking us out! Our sincerest apologies to all who came but were not able to get the discount. We are going to have a ton of graphs, images, numbers, and funny comments from Free Day on a Friday Recap home page post just as soon as we can get it together. Please check back soon!











It seems like it was just last week when we announced SparkFun Free Day and now it is almost upon us! Free Day is coming in just a few short days - Thursday, January 7th, 2010, to be exact.



For those of you unfamiliar with SparkFun's Free Day (see the original post here), here it is in a nutshell. Starting at 9AM MST (that's 11 AM EST) on Thursday, January 7th, 2010, each customer will receive $100 towards their order until we reach a limit of $100,000. You'll have to take care of shipping.



There really are no catches, but there are a few rules for fairness' and logistic's sake:



$100 max per person (cheating kills kittens)



You pay shipping

Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day



Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010

Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)



Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed

will be allowed There is no special code to type in. But you get only one order on Free Day, so spend it well!

order on Free Day, so spend it well! Only one $100 credit per household. We ask that you respect this limit and don't try to abuse this gift.

There is no minimum or maximum order. You can spend more than $100, the balance of which will be charged to your method of payment.

Only Credit Card and Paypal orders will be eligible for the $100 credit. We don't want to have people tying up inventory with POs, wire transfers, checks in the mail, or lost faxes.

You will see whether or not your order qualifies for a credit in the checkout process.

Free Day does not apply to our distributors. Sorry!

Gift Cards cannot be bought on Free Day.

Any returns from Free Day will be exchanged for the same item.

Every order isn't going to ship on Free Day, or for a few days after. We've got extra tape guns on hand, but please be patient and give us some time to catch up!

We are ratcheting up inventory for Free Day, but backorders (a.k.a. rainchecks) are allowed on most items (some items we simply can't get anymore) . We'll get you your goodies just as soon as we can get them back in stock.

We've beefed up our servers and completely re-written and streamlined our site. But realize that there are a lot of people with full carts waiting to hit the 'submit' button at 9AM. Servers may become slow, there may be timeouts so please be patient. SparkFun IT has even created a fancy banner they will be cycling in at the top showing a countdown and running sum. T-3 days...



Remember, if you want to stay home and in bed that day, you can always participate in Free Day by placing a side bet when you think Free Day will expire ($100k reached). Closest time without going over wins $200 credit. We currently have around 1000 guesses. I thought it was going to last 2-3 hours, but from the looks of the site traffic, twitter responses, and forum posts it may be much, much shorter.



Sorry Hawaii! Free Day will start awfully early at 6AM.



Sorry kids in school! Tell your teacher. Maybe they'll let you out of class for an educational cause.



Sorry office job people. You'll just have to fake like you're working (who, me?).



We'll be hanging out in the public SparkFun IRC channel on Thursday morning so please stop by and say 'hi'.



Please stop by SparkFun on Friday the 8th. We'll try to have a recap with data, graphs, and a breakdown of just how big things got.



Here's what you can expect to see at checkout:







Click for the full image. It will be vary obvious if you can checkout and get the discount. If not, the page will state that Free Day is over. What does 'may qualify' mean? Hit the Free Day submit button and your order will be tested. If approved, we'll tell you. If not, you'll be returned to the checkout page where you can edit your order or just submit the order like normal.



EDIT FROM FRENCIL:



Wow!



Our site has been up and down today from the unprecedented load we're seeing. We're tuning our entire site, top to bottom and inside and out to handle this torrent. We're also shaving off a few features of the website (temporarily) to make everything faster, such as rating comments. After Free Day has passed we'll re-enable everything we've disabled to weather the storm.



Feel free to join the conversation on our public irc channel: irc.freenode.net #sparkfun



