Lost Abbey Duck Duck Gooze Bottle Sale – The Fallout

A few weeks ago, Lost Abbey announced the return of the highly coveted Duck Duck Gooze.  Speculation began, on the allotment, the price, and most importantly the logistics.  Would Lost Abbey hold an in person bottle sale complete with line cutters? Would they go the smooth route like AleSmith and use an online sale with Brown Paper tickets, or would they have the same luck The Bruery had last year with an off brand eCommerce solution. Read on for the fallout of today’s Duck Duck Gooze sale.

On August 1st, Lost Abbey sent out a Press Release outlining the details of their online sale of Duck Duck Gooze. With that, the announced the company they would use for the sale.

“After careful consideration and research, The Lost Abbey has decided to use a company that we have a great relationship with and an even better understanding of, Nexternal, for the online sale of Duck Duck Gooze. We were able to streamline the process of selling Duck Duck Gooze while also being able to keep the convenience charges to a minimum. Nexternal has a brilliant track record of handling extremely large releases without any server interruptions or failures.”

So this morning, many of us southern California based diehards had our hands on the mouse at 10am sharp to purchase a 6 bottle allotment of Duck Duck Gooze, at $40 a pop.  Immediately, the Internet blew up, Lost Abbey’s Facebook and Twitter were met with cries of “it’s not loading” and “there is no product to purchase.”  Keeping their cool, Lost Abbey, and Director of Operations Tomme Arthur sent out tweets assuring everything would work out, but that a few technical glitches needed to be worked out. 5 minutes turned to an hour, an hour turned to an hour and a half. We were met with more tweets saying they were looking at moving servers and solutions and it would be rectified quickly.

All the while, fans were getting unruly, claiming they were sneaking around at work trying to order bottles and not get caught by their boss, etc.

By about 12:15 pm PDT, Lost Abbey announced they were going to do a “take two” and provide a new link.  By the stroke of 12:30 pm, most of us were in the same boat as we were at 10 AM.  At first, I was able to login, add to my cart and from there everything stopped working. It stopped working for another hour and a half.  Being an IT guy, I tried multiple browsers, multiple computers and even multiple IPs.

By about 2pm, I opened up a chat with Nexternal and explained I could not access the Lost Abbey bottle sale site.  Not knowing it was a gang of over zealous beer fans all trying to order at once, the rep told me they were under malicious attack. She told me they were making a change and to check back in 20 minutes.  Shortly after 2 PM, Nexternals had redirected the shopping portal yet again, and this time it worked.  I’ve never worked so hard for beer before, and I hope this was a lesson learned about eCommerce.

By our estimation, with bad technical issues, it took about 3 hours to sell out the 7,200 bottles.