Another day, another Catch Of The Day sale. As always, there’s incredibly limited stock — and a payment catch to boot.
Catch Of The Day loves a bit of hype, and its latest sale — ostensibly to celebrate its seventh birthday — has a variety of technology gear at quite significant discounts. $149 could buy you, variously, a 16GB iPad Mini, 2013 Nexus 7 or a GoPro HERO 3: Silver Edition Camera, with the promise of more deals to be revealed today.
There are two big catches, though. Firstly, stock is limited. Is anyone surprised by that?
Secondly, there’s only one payment method.
You can only pay via V.me, Visa’s digital wallet that we’ve looked at previously on Lifehacker. Given the prominence of the V.me logo within Catch’s own logo and the limited stock, it appears to be more of a spruik for a service than a sale that will be worth chasing in depth.
If you were keen on a bargain, in other words, you’d need to have a fair bit of patience — Catch has something of a reputation for going into server meltdown for major sales — and have V.me already set up in place.
Catch’s 7th Birthday Party [Catch Of The Day]
Comments
6 responses to “Dubious Deal: Catch Of The Day $149 iPad Minis And Nexus 7”
I can’t find the time, for when the deal starts. It looks like the facebook prize winners are announced at 10:45PM AEDT (from TCs) – but can’t see the actual time the Birthday Party sales start today.
and now it’s gone…
Aaaaaand meltdown. Right on 11AM.
I remember when catch used to have legit deals. Now they are point blank more expensive in most categories than their physical competitors once you factor in postage. Online competitors are usually significantly cheaper. The only time that isn’t the case is during these special sales, which are a waste of time because they have like ten of each item.
Yep ever since they went from that once a day sale to these shifting dodgey dave buisness its been nothing but down hill.
I mean Jesus on the day of GTA V they were all hyping their amazing US IMPORTED STOCK for $80 + $9 postage, not only is that over 30% above RRP they are actually making more money off it that US retailers for pete’s sake.
Its like this for almost every single thing they have a “catch” of now too, of course there are some exceptions like clothes. I picked up 4 nice volcom Tshirts for $14 each which are usually about 2-3x that in store at minimum, but then clothes are one of the few things that have astronomical mark ups in retail.
But anyway you look at it the site has become a joke, I mean look at those amazing bluray deals they have going on yesterday and its laughable, at best they are stock import prices (with outrageous postage prices) and the titles they do offer are the ones always on sale for 1/2 that at sites like Zavvi.
I used to check the site almost every day, now its relegated to moments or sheer boredom or if i need a laugh.
Haven’t bother with CotD sales for about 2 or 3 years.. it’s just a waste of time and effort.
Well Alex, you pretty much spot on,and ‘dubious’ gives it far too much justice.
I have to say today I had the very worst online shopping experience in my 17 years on the Internet. How the COTD cronies convinced Visa to be involved I’ll never know, but as a 14 year Visa card holder it was major letdown, particulary the new V.me by Visa..what a disaster! Error 500’s, JavaScript, connection failures abounded. Extremely frustrating was when you spent 10 minutes proceeding through the checkout process only for it to fail in the last step.
Having decided to try purchasing without using V.me I managed to walk away from the experience, all of which all I got for it over 9 painstaking hours..was a crummy $15 watch.
What a joke!!!!!! Their whole system went down within minutes!!!!! I have removed all of their crap from my devices reminding me how “wonderful” they are “NOT”.
After waiting for over six hours finally the $149 ipad deal came up. After many unsuccessful tries I was finally able to get into COD and was able to purchase said ipad. At checkout it showed as $349 not $149. Undeterred I continued to the checkout and tried to pay using v.me thinking that maybe a discount of $200 would show when paying. Oh no, cannot pay error type 500. Try again same problem. Gave up trying. Contacted COD today only to be told – quote from their reply “if you were not shown the discounted prices it would appear that you are not successfully attempting to purchase your item through v.me”. Oh yeah!!!! If the deal looked too good to be true it probably was!!!!
i think this birthday drama was misleading.the site was down for hours and somehow i managed to enter the sale all the items were sold already sold magically.!!!