Merchandise Mess – Disneyland 65th Online Shopping Event

Disneyland’s 65th anniversary is coming up this Friday, July 17th. I’m a Disney fan living in Florida, with a mad love for Walt’s original Magic Kingdom of Disneyland. So when Disney announced they’d be offering the 65th anniversary merchandise online, I knew I needed something from the collection to celebrate. For those of us who couldn’t grab the merch in person at the recently reopened World of Disney store at Downtown Disney, there was a special online merchandise event. 

The online event began at 10:00am Pacific (1:00pm Eastern for this Floridian) yesterday, July 14th. I got on my laptop a little before that time and watched as the countdown clock went down to zero. And then…. I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

When I first entered the virtual queue, there were 24,614 others ahead of me. Yes, you read that right!! I knew this was going to take a while, so I busied myself with work from my real job. I came back 2 hours later (3pm EST) and was at… 23,130 other like-minded shoppers in front of me. And the line was paused, with a note saying they had paused the line so those who had already started their shopping carts could finish shopping and check out. Ummm, ok? You’re only supposed to get 5 minutes per screen to shop and check out per earlier instructions. But ok.

It was over an hour later (4pm EST) before the line started moving again and I moved down to 23,106th in line. By then, the commemorative coin had sold out. No problem, the one item I wanted (the Loungefly backpack), was still in stock. But not for long as that popped up in the “sold out” list too. By that point, I was 4 hours in and felt dejected, so I gave up and closed the window.

But then a little later, I decided to try my luck again and jumped back into the virtual queue. Somehow the system seemed to remember me and I didn’t lose my place in line as I was down to 4,758! What?! How did that happen? Not a clue.

The line started moving pretty quickly after that. It seemed to be a rate of moving through around 100 shoppers a minute. FINALLY, around 9:16pm EST (over 8 hours since this all started), my place in line came up and I was able to get a couple items I decided I wanted if I couldn’t get the backpack… the t-shirt and the Minnie ears (I collect Minnie ears so they’ll be a nice addition).

Checking out was fairly easy, if you have a Cast ID or Annual Pass, you had to upload photos to be able to get your requested discount. If you paid using a Disney Visa (which I have) you’d receive an automatically applied 10% discount when using that card.

Overall, the experience was… not fun. Thanks to the current health crisis, a lot of people are still at home and could sit around all day. I just left my laptop open to the waiting room page while I worked and got other things done. But under normal circumstances, who has time to wait for hours on end online to buy some Disney merchandise like that?

But the real villain here seems to be . . . shock and surprise . . . resellers! Disney put a limit on how many you could purchase of certain items. That’s good. But over on Reddit, a group that calls themselves “sneakerheads” (they buy up and resell high-demand sneakers) apparently found a way to hack into Disney’s system to bypass the waiting room and go right to the stock page to place their orders and snatched up all the high-demand items to sell at ridiculous markup prices. Within just a few hours into the event, there were listings on eBay for the Loungefly backpacks for up to $300 (they retailed for $80). I know resellers will never go away, but Disney needs to do better to try to deter them or cancel orders that seem suspicious.

When Walt Disney World’s 50th rolls around next year, I hope they have a better system implemented because I just won’t subject myself to this sort of hostile-customer process again.

And now I get to wait up to 6 weeks for my items to ship… 

---

Sharing is caring!