New Stanley Cups Spark Sales Chaos. The Ecommerce Frustrations Nobody’s Talking About.

Today, Stanley Cups released their new Quencher H2.0 FlowState™ Tumbler in Arctic Blue to a very high demand. This hot demand was in no doubt fueled by the viral TikTok video showing a Stanley Mug still containing ice after a car fire.

However, the demand turned into anguish with one customer directly messaging the president of Stanley Cups on LinkedIn about being put into a checkout queue for over 20 minutes waiting for their page to refresh so they could complete their purchase, only to be redirected to a “sorry, your cup is now out of stock” message after waiting all that time.

The Stanley President, Terence Reilly, acknowledged the challenges of growing to meet demand and did a good job of responding to the issue.

Growing Pains: High Demand Puts Shortcomings in the Spotlight

Every business hopes for the kind of amazing growth Stanley has experienced, growing from $73 million in 2019 to more than $750 million in four years.

Which is why traditional Ecommerce is such a liability, and why leading companies are choosing Customer Commerce, the most robust Ecommerce solution for today’s fast-growing companies.

In the case of Stanley, their ecommerce provider woefully let them down.

This sort of rapid scaling problem is one of the use cases we built into the fundamentals of the StoreConnect eCommerce platform.

We removed the idea of having a “purchasing queue” and instead just handle the order, then and there, letting the customer get on with their day instead of forcing them to wait… for what? A computer to be ready? The whole point of having an online system is that the customers don’t HAVE to wait for a shop assistant, if they wanted to wait, they would go to a store.

Every order is handled in real time with stock being updated on a first come, first served basis which removes any guess work or hope for the customer.

Indeed, one of our clients happily experienced the seamless scalability of StoreConnect eCommerce when they went from an average of 3,000 orders per month to 35,000 orders in a day and a half, with no warning.

StoreConnect’s servers auto-scaled to handle the load and there wasn’t a single customer complaint of not being able to complete the checkout. All orders were completely saved into the backend Salesforce platform.

How do we do this? Our philosophy is simple: a customer’s time is gold and we built StoreConnect’s architecture with this at the forefront so customers don’t have to wait to buy online.

Hopefully the Stanley IT Team can get to the bottom of what they need to do, but having “payment queues” is an anti-pattern for Customer Commerce and will need to be removed to make everything work at the level people expect.

We want the Stanley buyer experience to survive this type of incident as well as that Stanley tumbler that survived that car that went up in flames :)