In case you can’t tell, there are two of us at Fine Lines. You can call me Gateau. Here is my version of the complaint letter to NYX. I really have never seen anything like this. Count me among the many disappointed and angry NYX customers whose best efforts to participate in your 12th anniversary sale were thwarted by a piss-poor customer experience.   It’s hard to comprehend that a company with an established web presence could run a promotion in so dysfunctional a manner, but since Sunday, May 15 I’ve watched NYX do just that. From the social media cheerleading NYX engaged in to drive interest in this sale, it’s apparent that either the e-commerce backbone of your operations was being run by amateurs incapable of handling higher than usual traffic (which should have been expected, given the heated promotion of the sale as a limited-time offer), or NYX had no intention of selling more than a handful of product at the advertised price, which goes beyond incompetence into false, misleading, and deceptive trade practices. As an attorney specializing in marketing issues, I can only say that if my clients ran a program like this, they’d receive at the very least a stern talking-to about an advertiser’s obligations under FTC and state law regarding sales and promotions.   NYX’s management of the crisis it created not only didn’t solve the problem, it actually made things worse. Blaming customers for flooding the site with too much traffic (after NYX itself feverishly promoted the start time and the race to get product before it all sold out), constantly moving the goalposts regarding what NYX would do to make good (check back in an hour! check back tomorrow! check tomorrow morning for a discount code! email us unspecified information to get your personalized code! we’ll email you soon, promise!), and finally all but disappearing from view has turned an enthusiastic customer base into an enraged mass. “Congratulating” the handful of customers who managed to complete the ordering process against the odds infuriated the majority of us who spent literally days hitting refresh over and over and over and trying to load our carts with merchandise, only to fail by the time the “sale” ended. And to see the NYX website working without a hitch shortly after pricing reverted to full price only added insult to injury.   I’d like to request a 50% discount code, given that I think the NYX line has good things to offer, but you have failed to make clear what information you require of customers wishing to take advantage of this offer. Given the reporting of insecure credit card transactions and the receipt of spam by people who have tried to communicate with you, it’s hard to feel confident that this communication also won’t come back to bite me. It’s impossible to trust NYX to engage in a fair transaction.