Stop! Turn that car around! Roku is selling the HD-XR for half-off. There’s no reason to go to the store!
The Roku is one of my favorite living room devices and it just got better. Now it’s $64.99 plus shipping and lets you watch Netflix, Amazon, and MLB content along with Facebook and Blip.tv videos. Good, good stuff.
Click through to figure out how to get the deal.
The Roku HD-XR Player retails for $129.99, but will be available for just $64.99 (plus FREE SHIPPING) on our Black Friday website when it opens on Friday morning. Details on how the offer will work are below:
1. Go to http://blackfriday.roku.com starting at 11:00AM Eastern Standard Time (8:00AM Pacific Standard Time) Friday morning.
2. Follow the instructions and enter the code “hdxrsteal” at checkout. The code can be applied to one Roku HD-XR Player.
Gozoinks. I usually don’t fall for this black friday crap, but in this case I’ve been eyeing this device as a possible xmas gift for a family member, and I’m definitely getting one. At that price, I might even get two, if possible (though it doesn’t sound like it is).
Oh wait, only the first 500 get this deal? Site is hammered. Can’t get it in my cart. This is why I hate black friday.
…and now why I hate Roku. After 25 minutes of hitting reload and entering in the same data over and over to try and get this, I finally managed to get the order in the system, only to find that there is no place to enter a discount code anywhere. Not that the code doesn’t work but there is just no place where any code could go. Maybe that’s because the first 500 are already gone, or maybe it’s because the crazy nut in marketing forgot to actually tell the dev team and CTO that they were running this little deal – I think that’s probably the case because otherwise what CTO in his right mind would let a site go down like this on such an important shopping day? They shouldn’t offer a deal if they can’t actually handle the customers – it just leads to an incredibly bad customer experience for everyone.
OK, here’s an interesting twist. While trying to get in on this deal, I ended up clicking “order” button thinking that there was going to be some opportunity to enter the code. There never was, and I was charged full price. I called to cancel and was told they were “working on the problem” and then I received this email:
“Thank you again for ordering your Roku HD-XR Player. We know you’ll love it.
We’d like to assure you that you will receive the Black Friday price ($64.99) on your Roku HD-XR order. If for some reason you did not see the discounted price as you made your order, or were unable to input the coupon code, don’t worry — we will refund you the discounted amount ($65.00) to your credit card within a week.
If you do not receive your refund within a week, give us a call at our customer support line and we’ll fix it.
Thanks again for being a Roku customer — we appreciate it!
Lomit Patel
Sr. Director, Direct Marketing
Roku, Inc.”
So I guess Lomit was the guy in marketing who is in the middle of al this, and it has probably been a bad day for him. I probably didn’t make it any better by calling him a crazy nut; sorry Lomit. Anyway, seems like Roku is putting things right at least for the customers like myself who inadvertently ordered a Roku at full price. So I guess that makes up for a lot of the mess, though I still think this whole thing could have been handled better.
Man, their site is getting slammed right now.
I just made the cut. The place to add the coupon was in your cart if you made it in time. took me 25 minutes and 100 refreshes.
I also had trouble trying to get the deal but I finally put it in my cart only to find out their was no place to enter the coupon code, but I completed the transaction… I sent them an email to cancel my order and received the same email as above and was only charged half price. The new Roku box is great, no more stuttering on my wireless N network.