Hacker News Reader

Comment by Diamons | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so you knew about the 71 emails not being sent and did nothing? Also, I find it hard to believe it was only 71 emails because of the number of complaints I saw in the original thread, unless the majority of your customers are HN members.

View on HN

What happened is that we made a mistake querying for the email addresses, causing us to miss a group of the first people to sign up for Instacart Express. This skewed heavily towards HN members. We knew a few people had been missed (because they emailed us after seeing the charge, and said they didn't get an email) but not why or how many.

I am checking out instacart, and a popup is being thrown on my face to register/login without the option to dismiss it! Seriously, WTH? This is beyond bad design, when your design is to extort the emails registration out the users. Not impressed.

I was in QA at a retail company. It's hard to do targeted notifications and updates. You miss one condition in a WHERE clause when defining your target and something like this happens. It is also fairly easy to figure out the size of the group you missed from a single example.

But it seems they had no problem with the WHERE clause when making those pay.

That's a cute response, but that's not how applications are written and presumably you know that.

I'm not excusing this. If they did it the right way they'd have 1. Set a date to cancel the existing program 2. Sent a targeted email to everyone enrolled in it which said, "We have major changes to the unlimited delivery plan effective xx/yy, if you would like to continue please follow this link and accept the changes or you will be opted out" 3. Cancel the old plans across the board on date xx/yy

But hindsight's 20/20, their explanation is more that plausible, and their response is more than adequate. Do they need to put on hairshirts and scourge themselves?

They probably just found out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com