Following the furore surrounding Groupola’s marketing strategy last week (2nd July) when they supposedly made 200 sim free iphone 4′s available for £99, I received an email from the company today regarding the web meltdown caused. This email has obviously gone out to the thousands of people willing to spend hours trying to get an iphone last week, myself included, and is probably the closest we are going to get to an apology and explanation of the events of last week.

Did anyone manage to get a phone in the sim free deal? We’d love to hear from you!!!!

Email from Groupola:-

Thank you very much for having tried hard to access our iPhone 4 flash deal on our website last Friday and we are sorry if you were not successful.

The limited quantity deal sold out amidst unprecedented traffic levels as literally millions of visitors from around the world tried to access the site at once. All handsets are now sold out and those who were lucky enough to secure the deal will be contacted in due course.

Despite having taken every step possible to ensure that the site would be able to run smoothly for this deal, the unexpected amount of people that attempted to access the website brought it to a standstill.

Please keep watching as we are looking to run similar fantastic and genuine deals in the near future and share this message with your friends and family.

Delivered by Groupola.com

This blog hasn’t exactly gone into meltdown but it has seen an increase in traffic caused partly by as many on the net have called it  “a scam”. I for one wouldn’t go as far as call it an outright scam, rather very clever marketing by the guys over at Grouploa headed by Mark Pearson. In one comment received “Duncan” said ”

£0.50 is the going rate for a unique email subscription via digital marketing means. Five million email addresses represents a £2.5 million outlay so the iPhones paid for themselves many times over.

As well as a gold mine from renting out the database, about 20% of subscribers will go on to take out deals. The guy who owns the site, Mark Pearson, is worth £30 million without actually producing anything.”

The power of the web is astonishing and if Groupola think they can come out of this smelling of roses despite their good intentions they have seriously underestimated the community as a whole. People looking for genuine deals will not stand for this. It goes without saying that you offer an amazing deal your servers are going to take a pounding – to not put into place a strategy for such a situation is unforgivable.

Only time will tell if they learn from this serious blunder and make ammends. I for one doubt it. If anyone knows anyone who managed to get this deal I’d love to hear from you, so far no one has surfaced! Shock !!