After mistakenly pricing a high-end monitor US$423.50 below the actual cost, Buy.com reneged on more than 1,400 orders Tuesday, telling customers who jumped on the deal it was "sorry for any inconvenience."
Buy.com advertises itself as having the cheapest prices for computers and software on the Internet. It went a little cheaper than it intended over the weekend, when it listed a Hitachi computer monitor for $164.50.
On Sunday, excited shoppers started posting to newsgroups and listservs encouraging everyone to buy one or more of the 19 inch Hitachi monitors while the price was still low.
By Monday morning -- 48 hours after the erroneous listing -- the mistake was corrected, but customers had already placed orders for 1,600 monitors. The company has also posted a new policy on the legal page of its Web site addressing typographical errors.
Buy.com's cost for the monitors was "several hundred" dollars more than the listed price, said a spokeswoman. Filling all of the orders at the promised price would have cost roughly $320,000. Instead, Buy.com said it would honor less than 200 of the 1,600 orders for the monitor it accepted over the weekend.
Company representatives told Wired News on Monday it would fill the rest of the orders at the company's wholesale price, instead of its normal price of $588. But when CEO Scott Blum returned from a retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the company announced it would simply cancel the bulk of the 1,600 orders.
Frantic customers had trouble getting a straight answer out of the company Monday and Tuesday. Some customers were told the orders were shipping, some were told they were not, and others were told they shouldn't worry, because the super-low price was a special promotion designed to attract traffic to the site.
Although many customers knew the price was a mistake, they are miffed that Buy.com won't be filling all the orders. Others say the company's process of selecting which orders to fill isn't fair.
Bryan Davis, of Waukesha, Wisconsin, said that rather than filling orders on a first-come-first-served basis, Buy.com drew names of the lucky customers. By comparing order times with friends, Davis found two people with orders confirmed later than his who had been notified that their orders would be filled.
"They did a random shipping," Davis said. "That is completely unacceptable."
Consumer-fraud attorney Sharon Kinsey said that while the customers might be upset, they have very little legal recourse.
"The courts are never going to allow people to cash in on someone's mistake, Kinsey said. "Generally, when you advertise something, you're going to be held to that, but not if it's a mistake."
