Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Erases Orders To Cover Up Pricing Mistake
The Knife writes "Amazon secretly canceled orders for a large jazz CD set after realizing that it had mis-priced the item at $31 instead of its MSRP of $499. At first, inventory shortages caused the online merchant to string customers along for over a month after they placed their orders. But when Amazon realized that the box set was under-priced by $470, it simply erased all records of customers' order in their account history. No emails were sent to customers informing them of the price change or of the order cancellation. Probably because it violates Amazon's highly publicized price guarantee policy. A customer who called to complain and request the CD set at the $31 price was given a $20 discount off of his next Amazon order." A caveat: there is no external confirmation that Amazon did what is claimed here.
I haven't ordered anything from Amazon since I made the mistake of ordering textbooks. Several weeks into the course I sent an e-mail asking why I haven't received my books. The response was along the lines of "wait X weeks to make sure they aren't already sent" (I think X was 6 weeks). After waiting and not receiving anything, I wrote back. They replied something along the lines of "we can't do anything if an order was placed more than X weeks ago" (yes, the same X). My order never did arrive and I had to issue a charge back. No explanation or apology was ever given.
Not only is there no confirmation of this beyond what some guy wrote in an email to Slashdot, the Amazon link contains a referral ID which should make someone some money if anyone buys the jazz cd set as a result of clicking on the link. This is pretty dishonest and the complaint could be completely false, and has NO place on Slashdot's front page.
I used to be on a board that tracked amazon pricing errors -- picked up quite a few items for next to nothing that way. They used to play along and make good on such orders, but it got to the point where it was costing them so much and causing such disruptiveness that they changed the policy, and mispriced orders now are usually canceled. That's been in effect for at least the last five years. They don't always notify the buyer -- which I think is a customer service issue where people fall through the cracks -- and they only rarely offer a make-nice like a gift certificate.
And how exactly do you come up with these monetary values you place on humans?
Ok, to soup this up a bit with respect to the plasma TV sale mentioned earlier.
Say that I bought 4 plasma TV's at the listed price of $27/each, printed the confirmation and used that to negotiate with my partners to hold a big presentation of my product at the Ritz, wining and dining included. Now say Amazon didn't confirm their cancellation of my order. Would I be able to claim damages because their failure to confirm cancellation caused me to fail to cancel the presentation in time?
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Seriously. Visit SlickDeals or FatWallet and you will see that there is a thread for every single pricing mistake, followed shortly by posters bragging about ordering the maximum amount of product allowed. 99% of the time the orders are canceled.
They don't have to. All you need to do is to send your item back, and you will get your money back. As all reputable online vendors, they have a full money-back guarantee.
Besides, there's a big difference between false advertizing, and human error. This was most likely human error. Apart from the fact that there's no way amazon can make money from deleting customer orders, or prizing items so low they are guaranteed to lose a significant amount of money (and getting nothing in return), there is no indication that this is a systematic thing that amazon does often or deliberately.
Hanlon's razor states: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". I think that should tell you enough. Someone amazon employee screwed up. Naturally, when the screwup is discovered, they fix it up, to avoid taking a big loss. That's all there is to it.