I am planning a free gift giveaway on one of my future YouTube videos - where I will make a large number of some item, and give them away to the first 200 people who want one.
My experience of running limited giveaways on YouTube has been painful - picking a winner from the comments, then successfully communicating with them to the point of getting their postal address, is painful and seems to have only about a 70% success rate - leaving me with an unclaimed prize that I daren’t award to a different person, in case the original winner eventually returns contact.
So what I (think I) want is something like a shopping cart, where I can list a quantity of stock, and people can ‘buy’ it at no cost, providing just a shipping address (and with each transaction decrementing stock, until it’s all gone.
That way, I automatically get a shipping address for each person who wants one.
I thought about listing the items for a penny each on ebay, but I don’t want them to show up in a general search - I only want to offer them to people who get there directly via the link I will post (and later remove) in the description of my video
Does anything like this exist as a service anywhere?
Sounds like maybe Eventbrite might work? You can treat the stock as “tickets”, and tell the system how many you have. Then every time someone “reserves a ticket” (i.e. claims an item) it docks one and tells you when you’re “sold out”.
It sounds like “tracking inventory” and “not searchable” are two separate problems, which need two separate solutions. For the latter, the proper solution would be to host it on space you control, with a robots.txt file. Which means that for the former, we need something that can be implemented on your own space.
Yeah, could be. I think the host for my site actually has some standard shopping cart offerings (I’m a bit wary of installing them to my web space in case they overwrite or break the content already there)