misprice
Latest
Amazon UK glitch sells thousands of products for a penny
Christmas is always an expensive time of year, but for some lucky Brits ordering gifts on Amazon, the festive celebrations may have kicked off a little early. You see, between 7pm and 8pm last Friday, listings on the website were affected by a price glitch, which discounted thousands of marketplace products to the insanely low price of 1p. However, Amazon wasn't directly to blame; the temporary price crash was actually triggered by Repricer Express, a service that third-party sellers use to automatically adjust their prices. The problem was quickly rectified though and Amazon says it cancelled the "vast majority" of purchases that did go through. Now that the dust has settled, the company is reviewing the transactions that were processed and says it'll follow up with disgruntled sellers directly, some of which have taken orders for stock worth tens of thousands of pounds. In other words, if you did manage to snap up an incredible penny bargain, it could soon be overturned, and if you were oblivious to the Friday night frenzy, you can now rest a little easier.
Taiwan 'orders' Dell to honor $15 monitor mishap (updated)
It's not exactly all that uncommon for Dell to misprice an item on its website and, if you're lucky, it might even honor it. But it looks like the stakes have just been raised considerably in Taiwan, where the company recently listed a 19-inch monitor for NT$500 (or about $15US) and promptly received more than 26,000 orders for close to 140,000 of the monitors. Now, ordinarily, Dell would simply send out a polite email explaining their mistake and call it a day, but Taiwanese regulators have now stepped in and ordered suggested that Dell honors the misprice after receiving a couple of hundred complaints. For its part, Dell simply says that it plans to "compensate the buyers for the mistake," although it's not clear if that means it'll actually be sending out the monitors -- which, incidentally, would add up to more than $20 million at their full list price.Update: Engadget Chinese tells us that the Taiwanese government has suggested to Dell that it compensates consumers fairly and will assist in legal action against Dell if they don't. Also, the $15 price applies only to the first monitor purchased with discounts applied to subsequent units for those who made multiple-monitor purchases.Update 2: Dell has agreed to issue a NT$1000 (about $30) coupon for every monitor purchased including those made through multiple purchase orders. That sound more than reasonable to us.[Via The Raw Feed]
