More than 30,000 items have been advertised for resale on eBay alone, after many customers waited for hours only to leave stores empty handed. The result is plenty of online rage, but resellers say they have no regrets.
Disappointed shoppers who couldn't get their hands on Target's Lilly Pulitzer collection this weekend are dressing down people who are reselling the goods on eBay and Instagram at huge markups.
The consumers, using images like the one above, are urging people to boycott resellers so they're forced to return the sold-out merchandise to Target in the next 13 days, tagging the posts with #LillyforEBay and #ForcedAccountability. (The collection was originally marketed with a #LillyForTarget hashtag.) They're frustrated by the more than 30,000 items on eBay under "Target Lilly Pulitzer," which are drawing bids of more than double retail prices.
Some resellers are lowering markups or returning goods after receiving angry comments online, while others are manually deleting comments left on their accounts from frustrated shoppers. But some resellers say those who are complaining simply didn't work hard enough to get the items they wanted at bargain prices.
If those who missed out "had the same opportunity and put in the same kind of work they would want to be rewarded for it," said Will Bernal, a 30-year-old in Miami, Florida who has been using Instagram to advertise some of the items he bought. "For the most part, the people that do it prepare better than the consumers that think they can walk in and get it at 2 p.m. What people need to start realizing is when there's a limited collection, if they want it, they're going to have to stay up throughout the night to get online, and most likely the website's going to crash every time."
Bernal told BuzzFeed News that he and his fianceé spent about $500 buying items from the collection, staying up to place web orders in the wee hours of Sunday morning and going to a local store an hour before opening. They've easily sold many of the items and anticipate the profits will cover or surpass the cost of the items they're keeping, he said.
"I got a lot of comments I would delete because a lot of the women reaching out to me were getting mad," Bernal said. "Even if I bought everything just to resell — we didn't — but even if we did do that and that's what we wanted to do to make a profit, there's nothing wrong with that."
The Lilly Pulitzer for Target collection sold out in minutes in many stores, and cleared out online within a few hours. Target's website crashed for about 20 minutes from the influx of traffic once the sale went live on Sunday morning and most products were gone by 8 a.m., Oliver Chen, an analyst at Cowen & Co. wrote in a note on Monday, referring to the event as "Pink Sunday."
Target seems aware of the bad feelings among some customers. "We're disappointed to see this Target merchandise for resale, too," the company told one commenter on its Facebook page. "It takes away from our goal of making great design available to everyone. The appropriate teams are aware."
The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Users complained on Facebook and Twitter about technical difficulties on the desktop version of the site as well as on its mobile app, and said that by the time Target tweeted its site was up and running, much of the collection had sold out.
"We do worry that most consumers did not obtain product, given sell-outs both in-store and online occurred within 5-15 minutes," Chen said in the note. Indeed, images of the despair were widespread on Sunday.
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