Groupola iPhone deal – Success or disaster?

Groupola.com, the bulk buying discount website, created a publicity stunt this week offering iPhone4’s for £99 – more than £400 off the retail price.

This was the message they were sending out:

The ultimate Groupola summer special: £99 instead of £499 for a sim-free iPhone4 handset

To secure an iPhone 4 for you click on this link on the 2 July
REMEMBER This link will only activate on the 2 July 2010 at 9.30am.
The offer is subject to stock availability and is likely to go very fast. Make sure you are one of the first people to visit Groupola.com this Friday.

With iPhone4’s constantly sold out, and in massive demand, there is simply no group discount to be had. Any website running an offer like this is swallowing a £400 loss on each phone. Groupola have refused to answer questions on how many phones they actually had for sale, so how much it cost them to run this publicity stunt is unknown.

The only way you could get the link to visit when the phones went on sale was to subscribe to their email list. I am assuming this would have generated a massive amount of email signups.

When the deal opened this morning, their website immediately crashed. You are going to need an extremely good server setup to send an email to hundreds of thousands of people at one time, basically telling them “Visit this link RIGHT NOW or you will miss out on getting the hottest phone ever for 20% of its real value” and be able to keep the site live.

The bad feedback has already started. There are hundreds of negative comments on the official Facebook page of Groupola:

Ammarah Ahmad Honestly Groupola.
I’ve been trying since 9.29am.
And as with everyone else, still no luck.
How about you ensure that this deal is actually available instead of advertising your fake ass scams?

Tom Philpotts @Groupola you should have made sure that your servers were able to cope. That was a massive error on your part, now you have many unhappy people who will not use your site. I think just by giving the people the chance that would have been satisfied with that.

Eddie Milner https://secure.consumerdirect.gov.uk/reportascam.aspx

Charlie ‘Dave’ Stevens I can’t complain to consumer direct, as the groupola website won’t load to get their address

Pasquale Biscardi shame on you ! still not saying how many iphones they had…. they need more time to make it up……

Debbie Miller So now they claim they have sold out. yeah right. never had them in the first place.

Matt Game Wasted our time, thanks a lot.

Maggie Bruce GROUPOLA! PLEASE PROVIDE A WORKING UNSUBSCRIBE LINK NOW _ I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU IN THE FUTURE AT ALL

As I write this, its only 10.30am UK time, and the above are just a tiny selection of the negative comments left on the Facebook page.

The deal is certainly picking up some good backlinks though. The Guardian ran the “story” here, much to the annoyance of their readers, who have left comments such as:

Jameswales There are already so many scammy “win an iPhone/iPad” competitions out there. Why does the Guardian believe this one is worthy of a news story. You should be ashamed to be running this.

Chrisbeach Lost a lot of respect for the Guardian’s Money section after reading this “article”

Fifeman58 How to get a free ad in the Guardian

1. Buy an iPhone for £499
2. Advertise it for £99
3. Get free publicity in the Guardian and a slew of email subscribers – total cost £400.

I thought I had stumbled onto the Daily Express or Daily Mail site for a nanosecond!

Hiphoppopotamus Holy fucking shit. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

It’s like one of those flashing ‘you are our 1 millionth customer – click for a free laptop!’ banner ads, only in credulous newspaper item form.

I’ll make 2 iPhones (for that is probably what they mean by ‘limited’) available for £99 if it buys me an article on a formerly respected national newspaper’s website.

I’d be interested in knowing exactly how many phones they had available at the price. But that’s something that an actual fucking journalist would try to find out, isn’t it?

I’m done with this toilet of a website. Hippo out.

Whoever it was in the Groupola team that managed to get that fluff piece article published in The Guardian certainly deserves a pay rise I don’t think its unreasonable to describe it as nothing more than a glorified advert. It certainly didn’t go down well with The Guardian readers, that’s for sure.

RealBusiness.co.uk have also reported on this, with an article titled Groupola: iPhone deal backfires. From their article:

Groupola’s website has crashed under the strain of web traffic, and rumours are circulating on Twitter that the whole deal may have been a con.

While we’re not suggesting this is the case, Groupola and Mark Pearson are certainly now feeling the wrath of the Twittersphere.

Here’s a representative sample of comments on Groupola:

“You shouldn’t run these deals if you can’t hack it!” - @iamsimonallen

“Spoke to @groupola over the phone, seems all the iphones have been sold. Surprising as no one can get through” – @Dean_Malik

“Everybody knows it was a CON. Watch your followers DWINDLE. CHEATS.” – @Gaspodesm8

“After today’s email harvesting scam, I pledge to cancel my @groupola membership & unsub.” - lee_baines

Update: Groupola have now released a statement:

Groupola is currently experiencing a number of website issues which means that it appears down to a high number of users. This is because of the sheer volume of people that are trying to access the website to take advantage of the iPhone4 deal.

Between 9 and 9.30am this morning more than five million people have attempted to log on to the site, far more than was anticipated. We can confirm that a number of people have already bought iPhones for £99. We are working hard to get the site back to its optimum and the iPhone4 deal will continue to run until stocks run out.

I find it hard to believe that the stocks have not already ran out, but they don’t want to stop sending traffic to their site I am sure.

So when the dust settles, was this all worth it for Groupola? They’ve got some great backlinks and a massively inflated email subscriber list, but on the other hand they have a temporarily non-loading site, a lot of annoyed customers, and their own Facebook page currently looks like a disaster.

Is the statement “no such thing as bad publicity” no longer true in the age of Twitter, Facebook and blogs? Or do these things in fact make it even more correct?