Google's press event in San Francisco kicks off, and the new Nexus 6P and 5X are shown on stage — now, thousands of people start refreshing the Google Store waiting for pre-orders to go live. We've been here before, and we know that historically if you don't get an order in in the first 10 minutes of availability, you'll be cursing at your computer watching the page fail to refresh and the ordering system fall apart trying to process orders.
The store links go live, orders start arriving. 30 minutes in, the Google Store is still up, and all of the SKUs are still available. Two hours in, wait, the store is still up? Wake up this morning, head to the Google Store — "they must be sold out now ..." — and nope, both phones (and the new Chromecasts) are sitting waiting for your order.
For once, it looks like Google's online storefront may have actually held up to the rush of day one pre-orders of Nexus devices.
Compared to previous years — honestly, even just last year with the Nexus 6 — yesterday's ordering was an absolute breeze. Sure those who bought right away are still looking at two to four weeks before their shiny new Nexus is delivered, but what's important is that orders actually went through. And if you committed to buying one, you can go to your order history in the Google Store and see your order waiting to ship. No more guessing, repeat orders or Google Wallet failures.
More importantly than surviving the rush, phones are still for sale on the second day as well
Perhaps more importantly than surviving the rush of the first couple hours is the fact that anyone looking at the news today and deciding to buy a Nexus 6P or 5X can go do so — they don't have to sit and wait for the phones to come back in stock at a later date. As reserves of phones ran low we saw the Google Store gracefully slip shipping times from "2 - 3 weeks" to "3 - 4 weeks" and even "4 - 5 weeks" depending on the configuration of phone, but importantly they never actually went "out of stock" where you couldn't order them at all. People can still, today, go to the store and put down cash for a phone.
With no carrier availability and at this point Huawei's own site being the only non-Google place to buy just one of the two phones, it's about darn time that Google held up to the rush of orders from its own store. Add to this the new offering of Nexus Protect insurance, and new support efforts in conjunction with the launch of Project Fi, and we may finally have turned the page on bad ordering experiences from Google.
