Now that the dust has settled down from Amazon’s giant price mistake, I thought I’d sum things up so people get a better idea of what happened.
A few days back I saw that some comics were priced ridiculously low on Amazon, $15 MSRP for titles that normally go from $50-$100. I posted about it and linked a few forums (I doubt I was the first, but I was pretty damn quick on the ball). Some other blogs noticed it and posted (including Bleedingcool, who claimed they broke the story, apparently stealing credit for news they didn’t find is a habit of theirs), and many of the titles launched up the charts, easily taking Amazon’s top 10 in book sales.
The deal was up for 16-20 hours, tens of thousands of orders were placed. When some titles hit the top 100, they were discounted an additional 45% to $8.45, a standard Amazon pricing strategy for top selling books. When Amazon finally took it down, they outright cancelled some people’s orders, some orders disappeared from people’s accounts, and some orders were shipped, including some of mine. Some people called and managed to have parts of their orders restored but pretty much everyone else was given a $25 credit, which I thought was incredibly generous of Amazon considering how many orders were placed. As best as anyone can tell, this was the fault of Diamond screwing up and passing along the wrong MSRP to Amazon.
This became a more common belief when Barnes and Noble did the exact same thing yesterday. I unfortunately wasn’t available to post about it, it was Amazon all over again on a smaller scale. Some people have had partial orders shipped there as well. Will there be another huge mistake like this at another online book store before they realize their error? Quite possibly. Will this likely have huge consequences for Diamond, if it’s indeed their fault? I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t. If your company just screwed two major e-retailers to the tune of $50-$500k, well they’re obviously not going to be happy about it.
On another note, I’ve seen lots of comments wondering why Amazon wasn’t obligated to honour a price mistake like this. As someone who’s had the luck to take advantage of a variety of price mistakes over the years, in America, most online retailers aren’t required to honour these accidents. I don’t remember the relevant laws, but I’ve seen tons of people attempt to sue large companies over similar situations and it never works out. Now, if they were to charge your credit card then deny you the item? Or ship it and charge you another price when you receive it? Then you’d likely have a case. Not that I don’t advise people to know their legal rights and get what they’re owed from companies, trust me, I do. But in a situation where some people received product, and the rest received a reasonably sized gift certificate? Trust me, if you got in on the deal, you did well for yourself.
