Why This Retailer Is Letting Customers Buy Yeezy Boosts Early

On Wednesday, Adidas and Kanye West unleashed the latest wave of Yeezy Boost 350 V2s with three new colorways of the sought-after sneakers. As usual, the shoes sold out immediately worldwide, leaving many hopeful shoppers searching for alternatives with the holiday season fast approaching.

Lengthy lines and struggling web servers are to be expected for a release of this magnitude. But one retailer’s website experienced issues that were so significant, many customers walked away from the release thinking they were successful, only to later discover that the site had oversold its stock and was unable to fulfill the orders.

The store in question in Sneakersnstuff, which calls Wednesday’s Yeezy Boost 350 V2 launch “the worst Yeezy release experience we have had so far.” But instead of placing the blame on resellers and automated bots, Sneakersnstuff is taking a different approach, saying that its own preventative measures unintentionally allowed more pairs to be sold than were actually available.

“The servers were fine, but the database crashed. Not because of bots. Not because of too much traffic, because that part of the plan actually might have worked better this time. But because of a technical overlook from our side,” reads an Instagram post from the store’s CEO, Erik Fagerlind.

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In other words, Sneakersnstuff is blaming itself for the botched release, and the store is going out of its way to make things right with customers. “We will find a way to try to compensate all of you who were affected by this by giving you pre-access to a future Yeezy release,” Sneakersnstuff promises.

Sneakersnstuff has previously voiced dissatisfaction with the way Yeezy launches are handled after September’s “Beluga” Yeezy Boost 350 V2 release.

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You know the deal by now. Every Yeezy drop is the same. l’ll admit that I do admire your positive attitude. This time around though, we also have to admit that we screwed up. It was probably the worst Yeezy release experience we have had so far. Not only do we want to apologize over that, we really want to let you know how embarrassed we are over the way it all went down. There are no good excuses really. Technically, we acted in a very naive and arrogant way and tried some updates on the website in order to actually give a better experience for everyone. You would think that we, after 18 years in the online business would have figured it out by now but… But of course we made a few bad judgment calls and things got worse rather than better. A technical glitch enabled people to order shoes that was already out of stock. The servers were fine, but the data base crashed. Not because of bots. Not because of too much traffic, because that part of the plan actually might have worked better this time. But because of an technical overlook from our side. Most of the issues that affected you customers are now solved. Some final ones are being worked out as we speak. Unfortunately there is no automatic way of reversing all issues, so it takes quite a few hours of labor to do this. Once again, we are truly sorry and embarrassed. We will find a way to try to compensate all of you who were affected by this by giving you pre-access to a future Yeezy release. We know it might not sound as much, but we hope that it is enough for you to give us another chance down the road. //Thank you, Erik Fagerlind (CEO)

A post shared by SNS (@sneakersnstuff) on Nov 24, 2016 at 8:57am PST