A week later and another batch of Wii’s is already being offered up again!

UPDATE: Dang, Wii’s are still moving incredibly fast. Stock is already sold out!

All,

I know it can be quite frustrating in trying to get your hands on these Wii’s. It is important to realize there are a variety of factors that can cause issues with you receiving your alerts as soon as possible. The one common issue among all of the current solutions is the delivery mechanism and its reliance on other services.

In the past, when I had my own system send email alerts, alerts became too slow because of the shear volume of emails being sent and the necessity of speed. As a result, I switched over to the Google Group to harness the power of Google’s email servers which are way more powerful than mine. This has worked out great and has enabled my site to remain live during the alerting process.

I also started to use Twitter this past holiday season to send the text alerts, which, by the way, are the most effective at this time, but then again we are relying on our mobile carriers to deliver the messages in a reasonable amount of time.

That is why I would like all of you who are frustrated and who believe this system doesn’t work, to stay tuned. I am working on a series of solutions, of which I believe the first to be released will be released by early next week. Granted, this may not turn out to be the best option, but should help in delivering alerts much quicker.

How will I know if this solution works or not? By using all you guys to test it out. So, rest assured, I am constantly working on better delivery mechanisms to improve time-to-delivery.

Justin

UPDATE: I reactivated Kmart because units became available again! Keep trying! People are getting through; you just need to keep trying.

Indeed, Kmart had Wii’s in stock early this morning; 4:08 AM EST. As of right now, I have turned Kmart off because they continue to show inventory, however when checking out, one can not complete the transaction.

Around 6:48 AM EST Sears then proceeded to make inventory available as well. Since then it appears units have sold out. I will now turn Sears off in order to stop alerts.

Yippee! Only the second time since Christmas!

Nice to see Circuit City had Wii’s available earlier today. I hope a lot of you were able to take advantage. However, I noticed they were still showing “In stock” on my tracker still at 1:30 PM. I checked into it, and of course they were not available. I have since corrected this error. At least the alert went out quickly enough the first time around, and it was good to see the Twitter mobile alerts were working again. Next time Amazon has stock, hopefully Twitter will be functioning just as smoothly. Last time, their system maintenance screwed us up. Can’t win them all I guess.

UPDATE: Yes, I am turning off Sears until Sears fixes their website. As Kim Y has stated below, and as we have known for quite some time, Sears website has serious issues. Their inventory doesn’t update real-time and as a result the site will show stock as being available when in reality it is not, hence why my site shows stock as being available. Here is what my site recently saw on their site as of 12:04 PM. Typically I turn Sears off quickly, but I have been in meetings all morning.

After a lull for sometime, it was finally nice to see that Sears was the first one back to bring a nice load of Wii consoles back to the market. For all of those that misssed this opportunity, I expect that Amazon will be having stock available sometime this week.Justin

UPDATE: Yes, they were in stock! Alerts went out just a little early and if you stuck around and refreshed… you could have been one of the lucky ones. I will be taking it out of the tracker now as stock seems to have diminished, but still showing in stock.

Well it may just have been a fluke with the Sears site, but I would stick around to make sure. Sit on the Sears page and continue to refresh it. Here is what my spider saw:

Recently, I had been getting a little discouraged by the Mega Mix alerts that have been going out as I am sure a lot of you are also. I can tell you they have been in stock, but in VERY limited quantities. I was actually able to click on this last alert quick enough myself to see that indeed it was still in stock:

Two rules to give you the best opportunity at snagging a Wii or any other hot product:

1. Be as quick as you can when alerts come in.
2. Ensure that you already have all of your account details setup at all stores where you are looking to get a Wii. (This speeds up the checkout process immensely.)

Doing both of these, it will give you the best opportunity at snagging a Wii.

Okay, so early this morning I noticed that Walmart had switched to “Preorders”, even though their site continued to say “In Stock”. I fixed my checks to take this into consideration and to show that the unit was indeed a Preorder on my end. This afternoon at 4:00 EST I got the alert saying the Wii bundle was “In Stock”. Sure enough, I click the link to see this:

So why did my alert go off as “In Stock” if Preorder is on the site? This is exactly why I save a snapshot of the page when I spider. I check my spiders cache; and sure enough here is what was displayed to my spider:

There is NO preorder mention anywhere! This why you received an alert. Please check all Walmart notices to see whether it says Preorder or not before buying. If this continues, in other words happens once more, Walmart is getting removed from the tracker entirely.

Justin

Well it has happened a few times the last day or two, where I send out alerts because I see stock available, but when in reality it looks as though there is nothing. Here is what I see:

Clearly this shows Wii’s as available. I am going to leave the ones I track at Target live, but I can not guarantee stock will be available by the time you get to the site. I know it can be frustrating see the alerts and jumping on only to see no stock available, and it makes my tracker seem like it is not working. If this continues, I may end up just removing Target all together. It appears they are floating just like at Toys R Us and Sears, just not as frequently.

Justin

If you are experiencing delayed email deliveries, I HIGHLY suggest that you subscribe to my Google Group: NowInStockWiis. The emails from the group appear to be coming in really quick, like mine used too.  This does not apply to other products, just the Wii’s for now.

The delays are not on my end, but on most email providers. I have been targeted as SPAM recently. Yahoo is delaying my emails for 1 hour plus. AOL and EarthLink had me banned, but I think I may have had those lifted. I also believe Hotmail is doing the same thing.