That was no mistake - it was a clever marketing stunt. They were under no obligation to honour the prices, and could have voided all the sales if they really wanted to. And they didn’t lose $1.6m, because the margin between the retail price and their value is so high - in fact, they may have not lost any money at all (once you factor in the free advertising value they are getting). People will be flocking to their website waiting for the next mistake.
Si
Why couldn’t it have been a mistake that they are using as a marketing stunt after the fact?
Because I am a cynic. 
I find it hard to believe that any pricing engine would allow a price cap to apply over all stock in spite of the real item value without flags going up.
Si
Disagree, Si, the margin on some high end electronics, GPS’s in particular is tiny. On a $300 GPS, mostly the profit is under 10% of that, and usually less than $10 of that.
All it takes is someone running a poor SQL query…“UPDATE Products SET Price = ‘49.95’ WHERE ItemID = 72” … and forgetting the WHERE clause.
I’ve done it myself, but not on a major retail site, thank god. lol
Oh, the stories I could tell if it weren’t a breach of confidentiality…
Lets just say your belief is naive. Yeah, it SHOULD work that way…but not all internet retailers DO work that way.
The sad thing is most people who go the mega deals probably don’t consider it theft, even though IMO thats exactly WTF it is.
Now, of course if an add for their house was mistakenly sent out out as “House for sale, $175” rather than “House for sale, $175K”, they would flip out if someone insisted on buying it for $175.
“A deals a deal”. My ass.
I wonder what percentage of purchasers would agree to cancel their transaction now that they know it was a big mistake?
If I go to the grocery store and a can of peas is mismarked for, I dunno, a penny instead of a dollar, they generally give it to you for the marked price.
Hell, I went to Walgreens the other day to get some Oxiclean and grabbed a tub marked $7. I take it up to the register and it rings for $11. I mention it said $7, the girl goes and checks, comes back, and tells me their policy is to double the difference and give it to you that way. She gave me the Oxiclean and a dollar.
I’ve had similar things happen when I’ve bought clothes- so prices much higher than a few bucks.
So, my point is, I’d expect them to honor the price advertised, as that tends to be what is generally done for consumer goods.
They don’t need to do this on the web if they catch the pricing mistake before shipping. There is a disclaimer stating so on most web sites - simply because its rather unlikely that that mis marked peas are going to cost a company $1.6 million (or in one case I know of $6 million in about fifteen minutes - it hit fat wallet).
BTW, Amazon owns Zappos now. So they own 6pm. And Amazon sells an ecommerce platform.
Oh, I agree with this actually. I mean, they certainly are within their rights to cancel the orders. I could see this being a good marketing thing for them, though- if they are fast with these orders and have lots of happy folks, I imagine they’ll have a whole lot of new-but-return-from-this-time customers.
They do analysis on the customers after these mistakes happen. These things hit Fat Wallet (or other sites) and its a bunch of first time never see 'em againers who hit the site. Not the loyal customers you want to retain when you make a mistake.
Ah, interesting. Well, there ya go.