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.
a British penny is worth like 100 U.S. pennies though, so it's ok.
If I buy something for a penny, I should get to keep it. I bought it. You can't be Hitler and take it back. Amazon should be heavily fined for this bait-and-switch tactic.
So, once the order has been placed, haven't you effectively entered into a contract for sale or something?
At which point you the seller don't really the the option to say "Ooops, we didn't mean to do that, we're cancelling your order".
Maybe it's different in the UK, but I thought they couldn't change the terms of sale just because they want to.
If I had made the purchase, I'd be pissed, because this means they can change the terms of sale after they've been offered.
Your website/pricing stuff broke .. NMFP, you offered it 1 penny, I expect to get it for that price.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It wasn't a glitch at Amazon but from a third party software. But headlines never were the strong point of Slashdot ;-)
RTFA, it wasn't Amazon but some piece of software called Repricer that automatically updated the prices. Amazon caught the mistake and cancelled some orders.
it was so bad competitors were calling each other to give a heads up
First we got skyrocketing prices, now a glitch is causeing near 0 prices. How hard is it to manually set a price, or at the very least set minimum bounds based on the cost to produce and reasonable maximum bounds?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
So, once the order has been placed, haven't you effectively entered into a contract for sale or something?
No, not until your credit card has been charged. If they have done that then you have them under the credit card agreement but before that they can wriggle out of it as a mistake under their own terms.
In some jurisdictions, shipping is taxed differently than the item price. So $0.01 item + $2.00 shipping may yield a different total consumer cost than $2.01 item + free shipping.
Because most Marketplace sellers on Amazon UK charge postage (and often hefty amounts even for small/light items), they often use a bad feature of Amazon's "sort by price" option - it doesn't include postage in the sort - to mark many items as costing a penny. Those items then very annoyingly appear first in multiple pages of "sorted" results and it's only when you click on them that you find the postage is 500 times the so-called cost of the product.
If you ask me, it's karma coming back to bite those sellers on the arse - maybe the third-party software dropped the postage charge by mistake? I do wish Amazon UK would sort prices *inclusive* of postage - this misleading price sort has been going for many, many years. Failing that, at least set price minimums (e.g. 49p without postage and 99p with postage).
"Penny?" knock knock knock. "Penny?" knock knock knock. "Penny?"
If you saw an item that should cost $10 priced at $0.01, and you believed the listing erroneous, would you take advantage of the error to get a quick bargain? What if the item should actually cost $1000?
If so, what is your justification?
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