Consumers who wanted to buy a contract-free, discounted Moto X smartphone from Motorola were dismayed as they were locked out of the MotoMaker website on Cyber Monday, as the site was clearly not ready for the high demand and traffic. In response to the Cyber Monday disaster, the company announced that it will relaunch the promo but decided to do it in two separate days to avoid the same frustrating scenario.
The Cyber Monday sale included the unlocked 16GB version of the Moto X for $349 and the 32GB edition with a slightly higher tag price of $400. The offer gives buyers a $150 discount while those who want to grab accessories are also offered a 30 percent off.
The company's chief executive officer Dennis Woodside issued an apology through the official blog of Motorola.
"I want to apologize to our customers and fans for the issues we experienced on our website with our Cyber Monday promotion. I want you to understand what happened, and what we are doing to rectify the situation," wrote Woodside.
"First, we misjudged the overwhelming consumer demand for Moto X, which was far greater than we expected. Second, our pre-sale site testing was not sufficiently extensive. Testing failed to reveal weaknesses caused by large volumes of concurrent orders flowing through the MotoMaker customization engine," he explained.
The CEO also disclosed that some orders were successfully placed and filled but admitted that a lot of Motorola customers were frustrated.
Motorola will relaunch the promo for the Moto X midday on Wednesday December 4. Another sale will be held on Monday December 9. As part of the precautionary measure to avoid another crash, the company will require buyers to register an email and will issue a unique promo code that will be used at checkout. The registration for the sale is limited to one email and one code per Moto X unit. Those who can secure promo codes will have a week to place their orders and design their phone via Moto Maker. The company promised that it will double the volume of supply for the re-scheduled sale.
Those interested in buying accessories can also use the promo code "THANKS" to avail of the discount. The sale of select accessories will last until Monday.
The flagship Moto X smartphone was rolled out in August. It features a 4.7-inch AMOLED display with 720x1280 pixels resolution (approx. 312 ppi pixel density), 10-megapixel rear-facing and 2-megapixel front-facing camera, and runs on a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chip. It comes with Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) out-of-the-box and is upgradable to Android 4.4 (KitKat).
