Slashdot Mirror
Amazon UK Glitch Sells Thousands of Products For a Penny
An anonymous reader writes For about an hour on Friday a few lucky Amazon UK shoppers were able to take advantage of a price glitch which discounted thousands of marketplace products to the price of 1p. An Amazon spokesman said: "We are aware that a number of Marketplace sellers listed incorrect prices for a short period of time as a result of the third party software they use to price their items on Amazon.co.uk. We responded quickly and were able to cancel the vast majority of orders placed on these affected items immediately and no costs or fees will be incurred by sellers for these cancelled orders. We are now reviewing the small number of orders that were processed and will be reaching out to any affected sellers directly."
WAS NOT AMAZON.
It was a junky piece of third-party software that automatically adjusted prices for Marketplace sellers.
The software cocked up, made everything a penny, and - I imagine - everyone stopped using it.
Officially, we don't have any pennies; we have One-cent Pieces. They are colloquially known as pennies, named after the British Penny. Sorry, the anal-retentive numismatist in me had to interject.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
No.
If the price is obviously a mistake, it's not a binding contract.
Offer and then ACCEPTANCE is a basis of all contract law. You make an offer but then you BOTH have to accept the offer to make it valid. The point of acceptance is not necessarily when you get an email saying Amazon has received your order. It's worded quite carefully.
Online, you get certain consumer protections but no consumer protection extends to obvious pricing errors, and sellers get the same kinds of protections.
It's similar to the "moron in a hurry" test. And even a moron in a hurry knows that it's not 1p for a widescreen TV.
And...
IT WASN'T AMAZON. It was a third party bit of shitty software that automatically "adjusts" prices, not unlike an eBay sniping tool gone awry.
Just last week I looked on Amazon for an old CD that's now out of print. It's an old classical music CD not rare or of particular interest outside of fans of the artist. In fact, you can rather easily find it available in MP3 or AAC formats on Amazon, iTunes, and a few other places. One seller only wanted 1 cent for a used copy with about 2 to 3 dollars for shipping. Sometimes people will sell old CDs, DVDs or books that have little collectable value for 1 cent just to make it up a little on shipping charges because Amazon ranks the copies by lowest price first in the Marketplace without counting the shipping cost. So while you could charge $2.01 for it and offer free shipping and make just as much as charging 1 cent and 2 dollars shipping, the 1 cent offer will go to the top of the list and the $2.01 offer in my example would be listed after anyone with a lower cost for the item, even if the item+shipping cost was much larger. You could sell it for 1 cent and charge $4 for shipping and get listed earlier than a $2.01 charge with free shipping.