DealExtreme's 50% Holiday discount a SCAM?

INTERNET SHOPPING Happy "new" (well..sorta) 2013, everyone!
Hope you had a nice Christmas and New Year's eve, playing in the snow, opening presents, drinking questionable homebrews and other fine beverages...and all that good stuff! Don't know about you, but last holiday season I ditched winter sports for the computer, trying to score cheap Hong Kong electronics...

Cheap Asian tech goodies galore

DealExtreme, or "DX" for short, as they apparently like to call themselves now, is perhaps the biggest retailer on the web when it comes to cheap USB gadgets, wristwatches, LED lights, tablet computers, flash drives, and other portable electronics. As we all know, most of the stuff you own at home is already manufactured in China, regardless of what the label on may hail from. Importing the goods yourself directly from Asia, instead of buying some re-branded quasi-"European" or quasi-"American" product, hence saves you a great deal of money. And for that purpose, DX is ideal, shipping extremely affordable tech gadgets worldwide, free of charge.

DX servers collapsing, again and again...

Between Christmas and New Year's eve of 2012, they had this special offer where the first 200 people each day that could manage to make an order accumulated to grand total of exactly $100 in their shopping carts, would get 50% off the entire order. Simple enough, you might think -- just fill your cart up to a hundred bucks beforehand, and then just hit the checkout as soon as the offer begins. Accumulating $100 by the cent wasn't the greatest challenge in this, however. The few seconds before the daily offer would commence, each and every tech geek on the planet obviously clicked that same button that would take them to the checkout. The DX servers clearly weren't designed to handle traffic of this magnitude, and consequently, threw in the towel.

The real con artists were the customers themselves

Soon thereafter, upset, disappointed and agitated nerds started sharing their grievance on the DX Facebook page. Only minutes after the daily offer had started, people were claiming that the daily coupon code had already reached its maximum of 200 orders and was no longer approved in checkout. This happened every day of the holiday campaign, and it didn't take long before speculation arose, whether the so-called offer was in fact merely a scam.

Lots of foul play going on, on the DX Facebook page.

Luckily it wasn't, as I - for one - managed to get not only one, but three orders through, with a staggering 50% discount. Two of those orders went through checkout nearly an hour after the offer had begun. Hence, the nay sayers on Facebook stating that the coupon code was expired after just nine minutes, were the real con artists in this drama. In an attempt of losing competition from other tech shoppers, they were trying to persuade people that further attempts at using the coupon were futile. And they probably succeeded, to a certain degree, in making some shoppers give up trying, which gave themselves, along with persistant b*stards like myself, a better chance of snagging one of the remaining coupons. So I can't really complain, can I?

For those of you who didn't manage to get any of your orders through - better luck this year!
(Given that the dear people of DealExtreme decide to have a similar offer this Holiday season, that is...)

/theJo