Amazon UK Glitch Sells Thousands of Products For a Penny 138
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."
Sigh. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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News at 11: Repricing tools are used to match prices as well as undercut them.
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News at 11: Repricing tools are used to match prices as well as undercut them.
Still leaves the important bit of setting a price floor you can live with.
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The repricing tool sent incorrect prices to Amazon for those products, according to the company's statements. Setting a floor doesn't exactly help if a bug with the tool means it doesn't respect it.
Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Funny)
They could insert it after the bit of code that reads:
if (price = 0.00)
price = 0.01;
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I wouldn't be surprised if that was exactly the bug.
currency (Score:5, Funny)
Re:currency (Score:5, Informative)
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Officially, we don't have any pennies; we have One-cent Pieces. They are colloquially known as pennies, named after the British Penny. Sorry, the anal-retentive numismatist in me had to interject.
Wait... you're a real live British person? While we have your attention... please explain Jaffa Cakes to us. They're about the most disgusting things I've ever tasted, and trust me, that's a high bar. Why would you intentionally make something taste stale?!? And orange jelly? With chocolate?
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To avoid paying VAT on it.
Re:currency (Score:5, Funny)
Only if you explain how Hershey's somehow make millions of dollars every year selling products that taste like, to use your colonial vernacular, ass.
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Tell me, what does donkey meat taste like? I've only ever had horse.
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I'm not british and like jaffa cakes. orange and chocolate is an awesome combination.
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While we have your attention... please explain Jaffa Cakes to us.
For those who understand, no explanation is necessary.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
Realise this fundamental truth, grasshopper, and you will reach enlightenment and celebrate in the glory of the smashing orangey bit.
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The GP poster was talking about the USA. Britain does have pennies (actually, pence -- one penny, two pence).
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Mint and chocolate combinations seem pretty common in the UK too. Personally I like them...
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we don't have any pennies
They are colloquially known as pennies
Got it, thanks :)
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They are colloquially known as pennies, named after the British Penny. Sorry, the anal-retentive numismatist in me had to interject
There's an ass-penny joke in there somewhere, but I don't think I want to look for it.
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Re: currency (Score:2)
"A fening is 1â100 of a Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark"
That's cognate with penny.
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To my knowledge there is no other country in the world to use the exact word 'penny' or 'pennies' to refer to their smallest denomination.
We do in the UK and we thought of it first.
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I'd buy that for a dollar.
Hmmmm ... legality? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Hmmmm ... legality? (Score:5, Informative)
No.
If the price is obviously a mistake, it's not a binding contract.
Offer and then ACCEPTANCE is a basis of all contract law. You make an offer but then you BOTH have to accept the offer to make it valid. The point of acceptance is not necessarily when you get an email saying Amazon has received your order. It's worded quite carefully.
Online, you get certain consumer protections but no consumer protection extends to obvious pricing errors, and sellers get the same kinds of protections.
It's similar to the "moron in a hurry" test. And even a moron in a hurry knows that it's not 1p for a widescreen TV.
And...
IT WASN'T AMAZON. It was a third party bit of shitty software that automatically "adjusts" prices, not unlike an eBay sniping tool gone awry.
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These are the same self entitled, spoiled brats that loot shoe stores to voice their dislike of cops.
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The people that buy 10, 20, 50 of these mispriced items and then bitch they didn't get their products....
Obviously they KNOW it's a mistake, so screw them
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Offer and then ACCEPTANCE is a basis of all contract law. You make an offer but then you BOTH have to accept the offer to make it valid.
No. Offer, acceptance and consideration is the basis of contract law, but any offer is deemed as acceptance once consideration is exchanged. If you go into a store and see a sign saying ice-cream $3 and walk to the counter you can be told "Sorry the sign is wrong it's actually $4". However if you give the person $3 and he takes it they can't then turn around and say, "Actually you know what, I actually wanted $4 for this, here have your money back.:
Many people have been caught by this over the years. Unless
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FYI, I don't think your description of how contract law works is correct across all of the UK. For example, consideration is treated differently in Scotland.
In any case, for a transaction literally charged at 1p, one might reasonably argue both that this is not sufficient to constitute consideration and that there was no meeting of the minds given that an objective observer would obviously not expect expensive merchandise to be sold for only 1p under these conditions.
(I'm not a lawyer, but as someone who ru
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In any case, for a transaction literally charged at 1p, one might reasonably argue both that this is not sufficient to constitute consideration
The way I heard it and have seen it practised in most countries is that the value of the consideration is irrelevant, just that something needs to change hands. I.e. a builder hands over a drawing or breaks the ground with a shovel, or you pay even 1p then the contract is potentially valid in a court of law. At that point breaking out of the contract is something the courts need to decide, and when it does happen fair equity of deliverance comes to play (i.e. 1p is probably all you're going to get if all yo
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The way I heard it and have seen it practised in most countries is that the value of the consideration is irrelevant, just that something needs to change hands.
Indeed, but arguably the purpose of recognising nominal consideration is that such consideration is a demonstration of intent to create legal relations.
We're talking about a commercial deal here, so presumably if money actually changes hands there is a strong implication that a deal was intended even for nominal consideration. I'm just wondering whether the accidental 1p pricing case is so far from reasonable by the objective observer standard that a lawyer could argue it. (I don't know the answer to this,
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I'm just wondering whether the accidental 1p pricing case is so far from reasonable by the objective observer standard that a lawyer could argue it.
Maybe, but so far the only case that I know of that has gone to court was found in favour of the buyer. Now in this case it was an expensive yacht bought for a mere 20000pounds from what I recall, but I imagine that for smaller difference the cost and effort to go to court would likely exceed the value of the item.
I got my 90% accidentally off harddrives under consumer protection laws (someone complained that the HDDs weren't delivered and the company was forced to honour all purchases), but under contract
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It certainly seems to be true that courts in the UK have shied away from questions of whether any given level of consideration is sufficient, favouring a simple finding of whether there was any consideration or not. My intended point was more that while obvious nominal consideration explicitly written into a negotiated contract might reasonably be interpreted as a demonstration of intent to enter into a binding agreement, in this case I'm not sure how well that argument works. In other words, it's not just
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Yes, yes, something about peppercorns.
It remains necessary for there to be a meeting of the minds for a contract to exist, and I still can't see how an objective observer would conclude that a merchant intended to sell expensive goods for consideration of 1p.
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Consider a shop (store if you're that side of the pond).
They price-gun a ton of items but the minimum-wage employee forgets to change the price. He tags a widescreen TV as 2-for-1 at 0.50c.
In law, this has arisen for decades. If it's obvious that it's an error, they are not obliged to honour it. If it's not obvious (i.e. he tagged it at 200 instead of 300 or whatever), then they are. It's in the case law, it's as simple as that.
Whether you are online, mail order or physical store, it's the same. Pricin
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Yes, but you also accepted their terms and conditions, which includes this paragraph:
"With respect to items sold by Amazon, we cannot confirm the price of an item until you order. Despite our best efforts, a small number of the items in our catalog may be mispriced. If the correct price of an item sold by Amazon is higher than our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of such cancellation. Other merchants may follow
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Far as I know this isn't an enforcable condition, consumer protection laws in the UK are strong and the price on the website is considered a shopfront, and therefore an offer and something they have to honour.
*Unless* it's obviously a mistake, which this clearly is, and then they don't.
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Their offer is conditional, and states clearly:
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Or you could look at it that the vendor made the OFFER and *I* ACCEPTED their offer can you not?
The GP is slightly wrong misleading in that the price on Amazon *is* considered an offer (nomatter what they put in their T&C) and that your acceptance of it does make it binding, *unless* it's obviously a mistake. This was obviously a mistake therefore they don't have to honour it.
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So, once the order has been placed, haven't you effectively entered into a contract for sale or something?
No. For online and mail order transactions, the sale is not complete until the product has shipped. There are laws that cover mismarked merchandise, and the vendor has no legal obligation to honor the price.
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".
Yes, they do have that option. Which is reasonable and fair. Laws should punish dishonesty, not mistakes.
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That depends entirely on the jurisdiction. In some US states, the price marked is the price that must be honored, or the shopkeeper can go to jail. The merchant doesn't get to claim "computer glitch", because there were so many glitches people could no longer tell them from bait-and-switch tactics. So the laws were passed in favor of the consumer, and if the merchant's computer systems aren't up to the task, it's not the problem of the general public.
Doesn't matter if you think it's fair or unfair, it's
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Those laws generally apply to retail stores with displayed price signs.
They generally do not apply to online sales.
If you know of a court case where they do, please post, i would be interested in seeing it.
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I think Amazon UK just created a precedent. What goes one way must work the other way too. That means you should be able to order hundreds of items and then cancel them all without any fees or penalties. After all it wasn't your fault, it was a "computer glitch" too.
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Amazon already lets you cancel any items you like free of charge all the way up until the time they are delivered to a carrier.
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I haven't canceled hundreds of orders on Amazon but I have canceled a handful. There has never been a fee or a penalty although I did have to fill in a small form explaining why I canceled.
If you did this maliciously with a bunch of items just to be a PITA then they would probably respond accordingly and cancel your account.
OTOH, I have had a seller raise the price of an item after I made an inquiry about it. That really pissed me off. I complained to Amazon but they said it was within their ru
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At least, that's the theory. In practice, a seller may not be completely honest about whether the product has already shipped o
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You can already do that. Amazon even has a policy of holding processing of credit card transactions for a short window (usually 30 minutes) so that people can cancel mistake orders before the charge occurs.
Even after that, until a product has physically been shipped, both the seller and the buyer can cancel an order. Depending on the reason there may be penalties (a ding to the performance rating for the seller, for example). Buyers generally are never penalized for anything, particularly on Amazon.
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Actually the laws here are biased towards the consumer. If the price is reasonable believed to be not a mistake (which this clearly wasn't) then the offer has to be honoured by the shop because otherwise you'd have a million bait-and-switch false adverts by shops. The consumer does still get 7 days to cancel.
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How the UK Government Office for Fair Trading regards this:
A right for the supplier to cancel a contract without notice may be fair if its use is effectively restricted to situations in which there are 'serious grounds' for immediate termination. These might be circumstances in which there is a real risk of loss or harm to the supplier or others if the contract continues for even a short period .
In short for exigencies like this the supplier has the right to cancel the order.
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So, once the order has been placed, haven't you effectively entered into a contract for sale or something?
Most likely the sale is only entered at a later stage. Could be if the charge your credit card, could be if the ship.
And most likely, they have terms and conditions that basically say "we offer what you see on the website, except if there are obvious mistakes". And the only way you could complain is if you spot a pattern, like if this happens repeatedly, or if they refuse to sell to you but don't change the advertised price.
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So, once the order has been placed, haven't you effectively entered into a contract for sale or something?
AIUI suppliers in general don't formally accept orders until they ship them. .
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There's a period of time between when you click "Submit" and when the order goes through. It's like a few minutes or and hour... anyways, until that happens, either end of the transaction can easily cancel it. In fact, until it's shipped I believe you can as well. Once I had an order that got screwed up horribly bad... I got into an argument with the owner in the comments section to the point that he got so mad, he stopped shipment on my order and refunded my money (which was what I wanted anyway) So yea, u
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People like you are bad for society.
Credit Card Charge (Score:2)
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.
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If you walk up to a cash register and hold out a handful of money, is the store contractually obligated to accept your money at that point? No, they are not. And that's all placing an order online is. No money has changed hands until the card is charged, and that happens later on for Amazon orders.
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Your website/pricing stuff broke .. NMFP, you offered it 1 penny, I expect to get it for that price.
Expect into one hand. Shit into the other. See which one fills up faster.
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Once a check has "cleared," the money is in your account and the Bank can't take the money back out even if the check bounces later.
If the check is a forgery, yes they can. For example, employee at XYZ Corp forges a company check to a friend. The check clears. It's later found to be a forgery. Bank can take the money back.
If a cop pulls you over, he legally can't just take all your cash and then not press charges.
Happens all the time under Civil forfeiture [newyorker.com].
An undercover cop must answer honestly if you ask him if he is a cop, and he can't initiate an illegal transaction because that would be entrapment.
Oh, you are SO naive. Cops can lie to you about anything [burneylawfirm.com]. And only the most outrageous police misconduct works as a defense against entrapment.
A judge can't reject a jury's verdict once it is rendered.
Sure they can. [andrewdstine.com]
The president can't order the assassination of American citizens without due process.
The "hit list" includes some Americans [theguardian.com] who were killed w/o due process. Scroll down to read the DoJ memo if y
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Zero for 6.
erm. 6 for 6, given he was quoting 'harmful assumptions'.
Not an Amazon glitch (Score:2)
It wasn't a glitch at Amazon but from a third party software. But headlines never were the strong point of Slashdot ;-)
RTFA, it was automated pricing software (Score:2)
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
How Hard is it to Price Manually? (Score:2)
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Repricing manually is great when you have 50 listings. Bump that up to 500, or 5000, and you need software to do it. The problem here is that a bug meant the third-party tool didn't respect the minimum bounds that had been set by the sellers.
Re: How Hard is it to Price Manually? (Score:2)
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It is an issue of scale. When you have sellers constantly entering and leaving a market as their stock is depleted, prices are not fixed and are adjusted with the market. You can do it just fine if you only have a few listings, but when you scale up to warehouse-level inventories you need software to manage it.
Hint: Amazon adjusts the prices of their own listings on a regular basis based on demand and the prices of FBA and MF sellers, and they don't do it manually.
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This has become a significant issue for my friends and family this holiday season, to the point that in some cases we have just walked away from the Amazon ecosystem entirely and bought elsewhere.
If you can change prices so fast that a customer can't look up something we're interested in buying, call their partner in to check it before confirming the order, and then add it to a basket, and the price change can be literally doubling the price from a good deal to a complete rip-off, then the experience of sho
Sometimes sellers do truly ask for 1 cent (Score:4, Informative)
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Sort of. The "buy box" that shows up on a listing uses a bit more complexity than just list price. It also factors in FBA vs MF, seller rating, etc. You'll sometimes see cases where the seller in the buy box is not the cheapest offering.
On the "all sellers" page for a listing the default sorting order is List + Shipping, so a $2.01 w/Free Shipping would appear above a $0.01 + $3.99 shipping.
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I find this to be really irritating when sellers on eBay do it... but Amazon actually fix shipping prices for Marketplace. For instance, shipping on books/CDs/DVDs/games is $3.99. (Full list [amazon.com].) For sellers on Amazon Marketplace, a price of 1c means "we would've sold this to you cheaper, but Amazon won't let us."
What they ought to do is to just merge the shipping price in with the product price. Combined shipping would make that impossible (since the price would depend on what other items you have in your bas
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Amazon UK lists the cheapest total price including shipping, and is even clever enough to know if you get Prime discounts and take them into account when ranking offers. I'm surprised the US site doesn't do it.
The reason some items get down to the penny level is that sellers use software to automatically set prices at or a little lower than the lowest offer on that item. They put in their fixed shipping cost and let the software set the sale price. They will often have thousands, or even tens of thousands o
Probably had 10 pounds postage too.... (Score:2)
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 selle
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Weird, because Amazon in the US sorts on price+shipping, not just on price. It works out to the same thing for some products (i.e. books), since shipping outside of Prime is a standard $3.99. It will, however, include Prime, so if you have a book selling for $0.01, with $3.99 shipping, that would rank below a book that qualified for prime with a price of $3.98.
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Amazon UK does too, I have no idea why the GP thinks it doesn't.
Oblig. BBT (Score:2)
Question (Score:2)
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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Was not Amazon.
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Doesn't matter - Amazon listed a valid listing from the 3rd parties.
The fact that the 3rd parties put up a price they didn't like doesn't change the contract that was made when people placed the orders.
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That same contract gives Amazon the right to cancel orders for pricing mistakes.
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What contract is that? You don't agree to something just by purchasing, at least if you do it doesn't trump local laws which are pretty clear about vendors having to honor prices advertised.
Re:Amazon is run by Nazis (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if the price is obviously an error.
And not until both sides have consciously accepted the contract. Acknowledging receipt of your order request is NOT acceptance of the contract.
English law contains this, so I imagine American law and almost all first-world law systems are similar.
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Whilst I know the Sale of Goods Act 1979 says that for a bricks-and-mortar store the invitation to treat doesn't need to be honoured until the money has been accepted for the goods, I'm wondering for online transactions at what point the implicit contract is "signed". Does the retailer sign the "contract" when they take payment, when they deliver, what?
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I recently took delivery of 4 sound bars for $4.95 each that I sold on Craigslist for $75 each. The price was changed a few hours after my shipping confirmation to $99. I got them with no problem.
TD makes this mistake frequently, only once (the sound bars) did I actually receive the merchand
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The downside is that it has taken TD nearly 2 weeks to refund my money each time I have tried this, in spite of their stated policy to refund within IIRC, 48 hours.
I am greedy and played unfair with a company, now they're playing unfair with me. Wah!
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Well, no, that's not true. TD often advertises fake prices just so they can upsell. Taking advantage of a price as advertised, even knowing it's likely to be changed isn't not playing fairly.
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And that sometimes makes things interesting in the case of responsible retailers who don't charge your card until they are ready to ship, because you're in a kind of limbo as a customer if you've placed an order but the merchant is delayed before sending it.
As I understand it, Amazon is generally reasonable about how it handles these situations. For example, if you have placed an order but it hasn't shipped and been charged yet, you can probably change or cancel it. But you have to watch out with less scrup
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I'm not disputing that, but I would like to know why. Once they have taken my payment and sent me an email thanking me for my order, how in the hell is that not acceptance of the contract?
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The GP post didn't say anything about taking your payment. Contractually speaking, that is often a more significant act than merely showing a web page or sending an e-mail acknowledging an order.
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On Amazon, normally as soon as you click purchase your card is charged.
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Not in the UK. [amazon.co.uk]
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Fair enough.
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The contact on the order checkout page that says, By placing an order, you agree to the privacy policy and conditions of use."
If you bother to read those, you'll see there is a long contact that says they have the right to cancel for many different reasons, including price errors.
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Those things don't tend to stand up in court, fyi.
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Can you find a case where this was brought to court?
I highly doubt most people would bother to sue, but you're welcome to try.
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The actual wording, since I looked it up for you, is:
"With respect to items sold by Amazon, we cannot confirm the price of an item until you order. Despite our best efforts, a small number of the items in our catalog may be mispriced. If the correct price of an item sold by Amazon is higher than our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of such cancellation. Other merchants may follow different policies in the event
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I'm not going to waste mod points on this, so I'll just reply instead:
You are a dumb-ass. First of all, it isn't bait and switch, it was an accident. Second, save the Hitler references for situations where it's actually called for. AFAIK Hitler never sold something cheap on the internet, then canceled the deal... so I'm not even sure how you made the connection. Third, it wasn't even Amazon... it says right in the summary that it was a third party pricing tool. If you can't read the actual article, ple
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AFAIK Hitler never sold something cheap on the internet, then canceled the deal...
No, but he sold the idea of moving east to some people, then switched the deal, AND he did so using IBM machines. [amazon.com] OK, not an exact analogy but comes somewhat close.