Amazon pricing error

Interesting take on the amazon price error

[gibbon]

Be warned, this could happen to you ... indeed on a small scale it happened to us. There is nothing more painful than selling at a loss but there is nothing you can do about it!

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

Wish my customers were more like the writer of this article... sigh

[ukgimp]

<edited>I heard about this the other day so I did not read this piece so I promptly started to explain what this article already explained</edited>

at the very least this post got me to a count of 700 ;)

[sun818]

There is nothing more painful than selling at a loss but there is nothing you can do about it!

Don't sell the item at a loss then. I'm confused as to why you think there's nothing you can do.

[gibbon]

i never planned to sell at a loss, genuine human error on the site ... wont make same mistake again

[Chris_R]

Something like this happened with a monitor some time ago. I forget the specifics - but all sorts of people were whining and giving their take on the law (not people's OPINION about the law is wrong probably 95% of the time).

It is amazing to me that if followed through to the extreme - these companies would go out of business. I could easily have placed an order for 1,000 of these and so could 1,000 other people. Amazon would have lost a half a billion dollars because of a typo. If it were legal - you'd be foolish not to buy 1,000 or more - as you could resell them on ebay for hundreds of dollars a day all day long.

If done on purpose - that is one thing. This was obviously an accident - an accident that hurt no one. No one could honestly believe this was a legitimate price.

I remember working for one store which had the following policy - I am paraphrasing:

If we make a pricing error - we will honor it if it is reasonable.

I think the example they gave was something like - if it is $97.99 and we have it for $79.99 - we should eat it. If we have it for $7.99 - the customer should realize it is a mistake.

I mean - I have seen at least a dozen times a gas station having a missing digit for the price of gas. $_.59 for a gallon of gas - vs. $1.59. I can't recall anyone every trying to get gas stations to honor this.

[quiet_man]

Apparently a 'group of lawyers' have written to Amazon UK over this:

[brandrepublic.com...]

(mods - hope this URL is ok. If not, can you at least give the site name / domain to let people find it?)

The issue isn't so much the pricing error, but the prominence and/or clarity of the T&Cs. Some of the points made by the lawyers:

Amazon (UK) doesn't specifically draw the customer's attention to its T&Cs during checkout

There is no checkbox to tick to accept their T&Cs

Amazon (UK) failed to ensure that the technical steps required to complete a contract online should be provided in "a clear, comprehensible and unambiguous manner" (EU E-Commerce Directive)

Amazon (UK)'s T&C's were confusingly worded, leading customers to think a contract has been agreed once an email acknowledgement was sent

mmm. A lot for us all to think about - and re-check on our own sites! Wonder what the lawyers are hoping to get out of this though?

[gibbon]

crikey...

if amazons t&cs have flaws in them, with all the money that they can spend on laywers, wheres the hope for the rest of us.

[gsx]

On the other hand, Argos were taken to court in the UK after selling a £400 tevelvision for £4.00 by mistake.

Argos lost.