No wonder they sold out so fast that eBay tripped and crashed

Dec 12, 2011 19:11 GMT  ·  By

There sales and there are super sales, and then there's the sort of event that HP hold yesterday (December 11), when it sold TouchPad tablets for just $99 (74 Euro or so).

We already saw how the sale lasted for the entirety of several minutes before they all got ordered off.

The traffic was so big and fast, in fact, that eBay practically crashed.

Now we are finding out just why that happened, and it looks like the appeal of the price was definitely not the only reason for the stock to exhaust so fast.

The other was low stock: the total was of only 7,850 units, 2,316 of which had 16 GB storage and the rest featuring 32 GB.

There was one factor that earned HP quite a bit of ire, namely shipping fees of $19 (14.34 Euro), about a fifth of the product price.

Since TouchSmart all-in-ones and other refurbished PCs ship for free, buyers of the tablets were definitely not pleased.