Dim-but-rich buyers targeted with million pound laptop
Can this be the world's most expensive laptop? PreisCompany's pricey laptop on Amazon Certainly anyone mad enough to cough up almost £1m for this Samsung Series 7 notebook will only get themselves a machine with a standard spec: 2.2GHz Core i7 CPU, 8GB of memory, 15.6in screen, AMD Radeon HD graphics and all the other stuff …
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comma != full stop
In Europe the fractional separator is the comma, not the dot (decimal point, full stop, etc) that is used in English speaking areas.
Other than in European countries of little significance like England, especially since it is the England Amazon website, where we do use the decimal point.
Did they mean Italian Lira?
Bit behind the times or shape of things to come?
Meanwhile...
Over at the MoD a figure hesitates before pressing the "Add to Basket" button.
There must be some mistake, he tells himself - it seems far too cheap.
Seems to be a fairly common thing
I've just started selling a few bits and pieces on Amazon Marketplace, and whilst researching I've noticed that crazy pricing is not unusual. For example booksellers that have items listed for £100 where others are listing for £5 or so. And it's not typos, if you look at their other items they're doing it all over the place. I can't work out what the scam/point is. Maybe a mate buys it, gets a refund and the cash comes out whiter-than-white or something...
It could be that they are out of stock. Instead of cancelling the listing, they just change the price to a rediculously high price until they get more stock in.
Demand driven
I see the price is now up to £1,042,128.62. Supply and demand, eh?!
higher and higher
Now up to £1,157,920.75
I wonder if the shifting sands of exchange rates are at play here?
Pirates. ForEx traders.
IIRC there's an option for sellers to set a % above the average price they want to sell at, so the price adjusts depending what others are selling the item for. Fallen prey to that maybe?
@Ben
Exactly that. In fact I think there's a whole formula system available to allow sellers to set pricing automatically, and sometimes a pair of badly written formula set up a race condition, ratcheting each other upwards. Excellent fun.
GJC
Pre-emptive pricing!
The vendor got the price right, he just put up the Euro value instead of the GBP value. He's been watching the news...
I should probably...
...call my credit card company, shouldn't I?!
Decimal point cock-up seems likely...
... as the price would then be £9379.15. Sounds about right for a midrange laptop.
Not a decimal place problem
This has to do with automated pricing algorithms of marketplace sellers. Here is a classic example:
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
They seemed to have corrected it...
...is now £1,042,128.62 + FREE SHIPPING
Not a decimal point issue...
As Dermot no doubt mentioned (he pointed this out to me late last week) the prices started fairly normally at first, but have been climbing exponentially every few hours since then. They'll go up again later today, just you watch.
This isn't a simple typo, something algorythmic is changing the price based on a broken assumption.
Has happened before:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/26/amazon_pricing_algorithms/
"Decimal point cock-up?"
What? How'd you work that out? You think £9k / £6k is a good price? Or £900 / £600?
another patent fight
Shirley Apple has "Dim-but-rich buyers" as it's customer base?
daymmm
i was 'spectin sumthin drippin with bling to get my slamin raps about bitchis gunz and rimz down on
ho hum, have to work for a living instead i guess
Not a decimal problem - a price tracking issue
As the original spotter of the problem I can say it is certainly a "price tracking" type of problem. In this case the idiots are tracking two of their own products - they probably meant to track the Amazon offered listing.
On Friday the Amazon one jumped from 899.99 to 999.99 and that's when the independent seller's listed items went bonkers. I notified Amazon and they were not in the slightest bit interested saying (correctly) that pricing was a matter for the sellers themselves. I think the more expensive one peaked at £1.2M before they spotted the problem, perhaps tipped off by an El Reg reader.
They have "fixed" it now so the prices are "only" 15% and 70% respectively more expensive than Amazon's own listed product (which is the highest spec model). I bought that one, from Amazon. It's very nice so far but I would not value it at a million.
Won, Two, Three...
Han, Tul, Set, Net, Tasot...
WON, Korean won?
KRW 937,915, as of 2012-02-03, 1400 PST, is USD 840.5019
KRW 104,212.8 = USD 933.8905
If anything is cocked up, it is maybe that the dealer got paperwork with Won currency and probably didn't bother to look up X-Rates or find out from the Korean vendor what values were used for the date of transaction.
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