Skytex has quietly been amassing an extensive portfolio of tablets and e-readers over the last few years. The company recently experimented with the popular deal website Groupon to offer customers a way to get some great tech at a low price. We spoke with the Marketing Manager at their company to find out how the entire experience played out, and the success they saw with the SkyPad Alpha and their entry level Primer Pocket.
The executive at Skytex commented in an exclusive interview with Good e-Reader that “The Groupon experience was great. We settled the deal pretty quickly and really weren’t sure what to expect. They had originally asked us for a 10k cap on the deal for the Alpha, but we didn’t have enough inventory to support it. We settled on a 4k cap and figured we might sell half of those over the 3-day period. We also offered about 7k units of the smaller media device we carry. We sold out of the Alphas in less than 12 hours. The pocket media player sold about as many units in 3 days. It was a resounding success and the residual effects were great… including increased traffic on our site, increased exposure in both the US and Canada, and an increase in sales. The day after the Skypad sold out, we were in the top 10 selling tablets on Amazon, reaching as high as top 8 (we were already consistently within the top 30, one of the better performing budget tablets).”
Skytex has seen so much traffic on their website that it was often inaccessible for the first day of the Groupon campaign the company ran. We also had many people visit our website and check out some of the comprehensive reviews of the devices we did last month. When you have a high degree of web traffic, often it can be daunting experience to meet customers’ expectations. On this subject Skytex told us ” In terms of handling the pressures of the increased traffic, etc… we managed to get our website moved to another server about halfway through the first day. After that, everything was fine. Our shopping cart host had no issues. Handling the increased phone calls and emails were tough at first with the small team we have here in California. Though we have the emails and calls down to a science now. Pretty much everyone in the office is pitching in. There’s definitely a lot of overtime going on, we’ve hired some extra help (creating jobs, another great residual effect of the promotion). We’re still plugging away at the orders to make sure we can get them verified and processed in a timely fashion. We usually ship out orders next or same day, but we’re giving a 10-14 day estimate through the Groupon promotion.”
Skytex is a great example of how small start-ups can benefit from some of the new forms of media that give companies great opportunities to enhance their profile and get referrals for new devices. It also introduces people to the brand and the main intention is to get them making future purchases. Kudos to Sktytex for trying something new and benefiting tremendously from it.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
