With today’s Lost Abbey Barrel Night ticket sales debacle, the time has finally come for an intervention. When taking online orders/reservations for something limited, here is what you (breweries and other beery establishments) need to do:
1) Don’t host ticket sales on your own server. Use a third party site like Brown Paper Tickets, etc. that actually has the server capabilities to be able to handle a massive influx of traffic.
2) If what you are selling is so popular that it is going to sell out in 2 minutes like today’s Upland Sour Reserve reservations did (literally, 2 minutes!), first-come/first-serve is just begging for trouble. Use a lottery or some other system.
That said, Upland used a third party site called Eventbrite so it actually seemed to go somewhat smoothly from what I’ve read. Albeit a lot of people refreshing the page at noon ended up with no beer after probably expecting to be able to reserve a bottle.
Running a sale as a lottery helps manage expectations. People know from the get-go that they aren’t guaranteed to get a bottle and are less likely to be caught off-guard at the last minute (which inevitably happened today). Breweries can also use extra (or all) proceeds from a lottery to raise money for charity as Stone, Smuttynose Portsmouth and others have successfully done (ok, it’s debatable).
As far as how to handle a limited release, that is another topic but post your suggestions in the comments as to what has worked and what hasn’t. I’m sure some breweries would agree that they could use help with that, too.
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I guess you could say the website FLAT-lined.
So what you’re saying is do what Stone did for the Quingenti Millilitre.
I think some people complained about the price point of the beer itself. That aside, from what I observed, it went well. Brown Paper Tickets may not be an option for a lottery system though. I think they did a one-time fee waiving thing for Stone.
It was Portsmouth not Smuttynose and that system was garbage due to the pricing structure ($2/ticket + $15/bottle). Ended up with people spending $45/bottle and many regulars completely shut out from their hometown brewery.
Ah, good points. $2/ticket is too much. A brewpub like that has a mug club, right? I’m not sure why they shut out those people. For that beer, $30/bottle seems more appropriate if 1/2 of the proceeds are going to charity.
Can’t agree with you more Adam. I am tired of popular breweries having absolutely no clue about how to run events, ticket sales, etc… Their bumbling only serves to piss off their loyalists, waste people’s time, etc…
Your mention of Portsmouth and their scratch-off lottery tickets this past year for Kate the Great is an interesting example of outside-the-box thinking, but it still forced people to show up at the brewery in mass, to get the
The ideal situation seems to be a combination of a lottery (with lottery ticket sales proceeds going to a charity) and then winners of the lottery invited to purchase the beer (with a guarantee, to help avoid a massive crush at the point of distribution.)
The other way to handle this of course is to raise the price to a point where demand will fall off somewhat – which eliminates the problem to some extent…but also pisses people off. Though it does help the brewery retain most of the profit in the market – as opposed to allowing a secondary seller to reap the rewards of standing in line.
(Adam – we should write a paper together on this topic!!)
Matt – just not enough hours in the day! Damnit!
But yeah this would be worthy of a paper for a college course somewhere.
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