whats the dealio on bonktown?
 

What is with bonktown? Do they only have 1 item for sale at a time? Is there more than 1 item per day? How long does each item last? Is there a consistent time limit for each item (ex: 20 min/item or untill sold out).

Most of your questions could be answered by visiting www.bonktown.com

More than 1 item per day and usually a time limit. Not sure how long, though.

There's a little graph to the right - 30 minutes and it counts it down.

Most items are 30 minutes. Sometimes it's a little more or less. Sometimes they have crazy deals that sell out in a few minutes.

The Google Chome extension is really useful if you are waiting to snag something in particular.

usually decent deals, but shipping is a bit expensive so you have to buy a lot of stuff for it to be worth it (at least to me). That means your stuff doesn't come for a while, so you need patience.

I was able to answer all of those questions for myself, as well as purchase a set of Time pedals for a great price, by glancing at the website for all of 30 seconds....

How do you make multiple purchases on bonktown? The last time I tried to buy something it canceled because I didn't check out before the timer ran up.

First rule of Bonktown: You do not talk about Bonktown

Urban, when you finish your checkout you get a little 5? minute timer where you can elect to have them hold your item to ship with future purchases. I've never done it, but it is a cool option.

Their shipping is fair unless you're buying something really small/inexpensive. I've also found that they ship REALLY quick. Seems they always use UPS and often I'll get a shipping confirmation just hours after making the purchase.

Yeah you can say hold it while you buy more stuff (and I think each additional item is like 99 cents). If you do it that way (at least this is how it worked 6 months ago the last time I purchased stuff from them) you can have them hold it for like 2 weeks from the first purchase while you buy additional stuff and then it was all shipped at once. But you had to check out fully and not just add it to the cart for each item.

Confirmed - I just ordered some socks (the NO COTTON socks thread had me convinced to try again) and have 7 days, 17 hours to add more stuff to my cart for $.99 until the order ships. I can choose to ship it any time earlier than that by clicking a button.

They have pretty good deals on small items (gloves, tape, etc) but the shipping can kill the deal. Their combined shipping option for $1 per extra item will save money if you tend to buy a lot of things, but it might pull you into the mindset of "GOTTA BUY MORE FROM BONKTOWN TO SAVE SHIPPING".

Definitely select the combined shipping deal (after you place your order) if you are buying smaller items, else shipping can kill the deals. Some prices on Bonktown are really good; others are mediocre. They also sell alot of house-brand stuff which is cheap, but not always great quality.

1st rule of bonktown...

Thanks for the explanation. Since you don't know when the next deal for you will come up, what happens if you have just one item when the time limit is up? Can you cancel or did you just pay too much to ship a small deal?

true, that's how I ended up with a huge purchase from them one month (in a month where we had lots of other large unexpected purchase) which led to my wife and I deciding to not buy things we don't need for a while. So no new bibs/jerseys/upgrade parts for a while.

No cancelling, once bought it's bought. so if you wait and don't find anything else you want you pay a high price for shipping, plus you've waited a long time.

I just don't buy small items unless I have already bought a large item and can add the small item to the shipment. Small items will usually come around again.

I just did a test Red RD buy, put in my zip code, $6 to ship. Makes sense. That is normal shipping. Would have saved me about $20 over what I paid on ebay. But, whatever.

I agree the deals can be good but most of us are busy and don't have time to watch for our desired item.

I also agree that shipping can be relatively high for low-priced items, so what looks like an amazing deal (say 5 tubes for $10) may not be such a great deal after the shipping is added on.

I don't completely understand or agree with their business model, but hey, it's theirs.

Psssst, www.gearscan.com

If you don't want to wait for deals, check out their other web sites: realcyclist.com, competitivecyclist.com, backcountry.com, departmentofgoods.com, and a few others

Orders from all the web sites seem to go through the same customer service department, which is excellent

They are probably using bonktown.com mostly as a teaser and also to deal with closeouts and overstocks.

FYI...The mothership is Backcountry.com and gearscan is the site that rolls all of there outlets into one place...bonktown, steep and cheap, chainlove, whiskey militia and many others.

You can also have them hold items so you can combine shipping later BTW.