Just wanted to address the concern with pricing.
Since last September our pricing for keys has been $30 for a single color in a key and $5 extra for each additional color. Each of the keys in this sale have 3 colors and are therefore $40 base price. Brad includes free shipping domestic for orders over $25 iirc. The tiny markup he has is more than fair for his time and effort.
Pricing made sense/was fair to me, I think people had just grown accustomed to the $25ish dollar price point (me included), so the bump up to $45 triggered a little sticker shock. I mentioned the things I attributed to in a previous post (pretty much what you said), but also have to take into account that Widgie seems to be more involved in the capmaking tom foolery process now, so it's not unreasonable we compensate her for her time/effort too.
Not a big deal in the long-run, just kind of a one time ordeal.
It looks like if I'm hearing things correctly folks would like to have formats where they can at least let it be known that they would like a certain key. They have a chance of being selected, but even if they didn't they would at least be able to show their support and feel like their time wasn't wasted.
Even if I'm not feeling the crowd, I can support this concept and you've all got my promise that we are working toward making sales easier to attend, fair, and fun.
Part of the issue I think might've occurred was that shopify's content delivery system seemed like it gave people from specific regions an advantage over others. So by the time many were even shown the product was available, it was already sold out before they could check out with it. People are just wanting a more "fair" system where, like you said, they at least have a real chance at buying. An e-mail or PM sale would be more "fair" because people can somewhat account for their latency to you, but single-entry raffles probably provide the most fair system overall because everyone hypothetically has an equal chance (assuming they aren't entering with multiple accounts/their "significant other", "friend", etc. aren't entering for them), especially if it runs through multiple time zones. Those also allow the buyer to blame their bad luck, instead of blame a website, so overall disappointment/frustrating levels wind up a lot lower.
I think most will agree that anything is better than gator though
