With this morning’s Pelican debacle and the many online beer reservation debacles that have come before it, it’s time to propose a solution. What I propose should save a lot of headaches between breweries, retailers and consumers in the beer geek community when it comes to online limited beer release reservations. Not all of these points will apply to every release because some are done online & shipped though most are for in-person pickup. Some of these can be tweaked to your situation obviously.
1. Announce details (points 2-10 below) of an upcoming limited beer release on your website, in your newsletter, on Facebook, on Twitter, etc.
2. At [time in EST] on [date], we will send out a link to a reservation form (hosted on Google Docs) for [beer name] through our newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter [link to signup].
3. The first 100 people to successfully fill out the form will have an opportunity to buy the beer.
4. We are unable to close the form at exactly 100 people so successfully filling out the form does not guarantee you a chance to buy the beer.
5. We will close the form shortly after 100 people have submitted it. You will receive an email within an hour later telling you whether you were one of the first 100.
6. If in the first 100, the email will contain a link to a page where you will have to enter in your credit card details and place an order for the beer.
7. You will have up to 8 hours to place an order before your reservation spot is available to an alternate.
8. If not in the first 100, you will be informed that you are an alternate. If the beer isn’t sold out by the first 100, you may be sent a link to the order page but this is not guaranteed.
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A Google account is free to you.
Here is an example reservation form. Go ahead & fill out the form (w/ fake details) to see what the confirmation message looks like.
Here is what the timestamped results look like. The results are normally private to you but I’m purposely sharing my private link to demonstrate this.
The primary advantage is that the form should still work fine under the weight of hundreds of people trying to get in at once. If you’re selling event tickets through a site like BrownPaperTickets, I think their servers can handle the load. This solution is more for informal programs.
Makes sense to me.
I don’t know if anything will “fix” the process. Your ideas sound good but, I still think someone will find a way to complain about it.
I agree that some sort of system is needed to better manage these situations. Maybe beer companies could look at popular marathons like Boston and New York that have also faced these issues in the past and mirror some of their registration remedies so that everyone is happy. Maybe sending out emails where people pay for a guaranteed registration spot and do rolling days/times would work as well…
Paying for a registration spot is certainly a viable way to limit registrations while making some extra cash off of the sale.
Thanks Adam, I was going to write you in private to see if you had some suggestions for our up coming Cellar Reserve Membership sale.. All details noted and will probably be implemented in a similar way, whether we need to or not..
Chad
Sure thing. Google Docs is pretty easy to navigate and most people have a Google account already.
That’s fine. They can complain all they want about an effective process. There’s no excuse for an ineffective process though. That deserves complaining.
I think the Pelican thing worked out great, I didn’t expect to get any but apparently got one of the last few cases when I lazily called up 10 minutes. Sounds like a success to me!
Anyway, that model isn’t super flexible (and some places do something similar, 50-50 and Eclipse, for instance). What breweries need to do is contract the thing out to some service provider that can handle the traffic.
you do realize that doing this will eliminate the free press and reduce buzz from the release and for the brewery right? isn’t that half the reason for these limited releases?
Lottery. Why does “being first” matter? Open registration for ~4-8 hours and randomly pick 100 names. People don’t buy after X hours, then pick the next random name.
Stuart, you mean like Google as I suggested?
Jer, so you’re suggesting that breweries are purposely botching these releases to generate more buzz? Interesting.
Jeff, thought about that as well though I think having a long time frame could open it up to people getting their friends/mules involved in signing up. If you make it first-come, first-serve, I think you reduce the number of extra signups like that. By the time, someone sends fills out the form and then sends their mules the link, 100 people will have probably already submitted the form. Of course, someone could have their mules on top of it at the time the link is revealed anyway…
Not totally against it but would have to think it through.
Keep the suggestions coming!
i was being a bit tongue and cheek, but you have to agree that these botched releases are not be held against them in anyway. is it creating any ill will that will prevent them from not selling out future releases?
Some ill will but not enough for it to lose them many customers.
First and foremost everyone needs to act like an adult, this is beer, not rations in wartime. Next would be an announced release date, pre-shipment to bars and retailers for the release date and then a first come first serve at the brewery. Lotteries and pre-orders are all impossible ideas that will always disappoint through error. And for those who feel that a first come first serve isn’t fair, then you have far to much sense of entitlement. With that said it is wonderful that the consumer excitement and willingness to buy these releases is there, but also be glad that these breweries exist much less take the time to do these beers often and a net loss on the books.
Someone suggested them contracting the online sale to a server that can handle it. I kindly suggest they contract the brewing to a brewery that make enough to make the online form unnecessary.
Honestly, if I get a beer I really want, I am really happy. If I don’t, oh well. It’s not up to the brewer to continue to bend to the fanatics (yes, I am one at times). Their bread and butter are the year-round beers.
I’ll complain. My work blocks any and all websites that have the name beer, brewery, etc. in the web address and websites that have alcohol as its main focus/subject. How is that fair to me when I work from 6am to 2:30 pm Monday through Friday and sometimes Saturday? Too bad so sad?
@Roger – Unfortunately, yes. “Too bad, so sad.”
We’re not a brewery but I think the way we handle pre-sales of special release beers works fantastic. Once we have confirmation from our distributors of how many cases will be made available to us and how much each case will cost we put it on our site for pre-sale. Depending on how many cases we’ll be able to get we restrict the amount any person can purchase in a single order. For example we just got in Abyss and ended up getting in quite a bit more than ever before so we extended the limit to 4 bottles per person where in the past its been 2 bottles. Once you place your order your bottles are reserved they are yours.
I think brewers that try to hype their products with these special releases and then fail at the execution should really look at utilizing better technology and putting a robust shopping cart plug in into their site so these issues won’t arise.
Just to chime in with our experience handling this sort of thing, while not everyone was 100% pleased with the charity lottery system we implemented (an impossible standard anyway), most people were quite happy, and we encountered almost none of the problems typically associated with these sorts of releases.
The best part, of course, was that we raised $15,000 for 2 great charities in the process, an amount that shocked and impressed everyone involved.
Here’s the press release describing the lottery, along with some of the fan feedback: http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/3971611
Cheers,
Jacob McKean
Communications Specialist
Stone Brewing Co.