HORRIFIED Amazon retailers fear GOING BUST after 1p pricing cockup

Re: Shurely

Don't worry ResellerExpress have Clause 2.4 to protect themselves.

Re: Shurely

If that was the case, MS and others would have been bankrupt long long ago. Oh how I wish that were true :D

Re: Shurely

ResellerExpress accepts liability for when its software messes up, and has an escrow account set up to handle those cases where the sale will go through, right?

No, they have something called "small print". I would, too.

Re: Shurely

"ResellerExpress accepts liability for when its software messes up, and has an escrow account set up to handle those cases where the sale will go through, right?"

So for a 50 pound per month service, you expect to receive the vendor to hold in escrow funds equivalent to what is being offered for sale?

"any single failure" == "one missapplied price"

Re: price mistakes

Invitation to treat - web sites invite offers to buy, contract exchange concluded on dispatch/delivery. Bankruptcy talk is hysteria - or retailers not actually sanity checking the deals they do before dispatch - and if they dispatched all their orders within the hour or so before this was spotted, I'll be a monkey's uncle.

Re: price mistakes

Not if the order is fulfilled. Then it becomes interesting.

F.E. When United cocked up their pricing algo a few years back they honored their tickets. Under similar circumstances a few years ago another airline (which we can safely call Scumbag Air) did not. They should not have been allowed by consumer law, but large companies in the UK can generally get away with mass murder if they want to. Small ones - not so much.

The problem this time is with companies which have taken the AWS economy to its ultimate extreme - their shop front is AWS, their payment is AWS and their _FULFILLMENT_ is A(W)S too (the mechanical turk, warehousing and logistics). So the orders were fulfilled before the owner could do a thing. Outsourcing your core business without leaving a _SINGLE_ control point - gets you every time, all the time. It is not a question of will, it is a question of when and frankly, I am finding it a bit difficult to commiserate here - you get whatever Christmas you deserve.

Re: It's not just the pricing...

Had that a while back with Ebay, was selling an old phone and Ebay's catalogue description included that it had 'Wireless'

It didn't so I skipped the catalogue entry and wrote my own - also pinged support a quick email to let them know their catalogue template was wrong.

A week later I got an email saying my listing had been cancelled for failing to use the catalogue entry, so responded them telling them to fuck themselves and sold the phone (and everything else since) elsewhere.

Re: It's not just the pricing...

My employer sold things through Amazon at one point. We did succeed in getting details changed, but it was a PITA.

Problem with Amazon was things like this:-

Listings were (are?) submitted in bulk using the standard unique UPC/EAN barcode as the product identifier. We automatically created a listing of all the products we sold (correctly) identified via their barcodes.

We then got a complaint from a customer that we'd sent him a single black ink cartridge when he was expecting the set. Turned out that an entirely unrelated seller had already created a listing for a *set* of four cartridges and wrongly used the *individual* black cartridge's code for it. Probably because he was selling cartridges in individual boxes, didn't have a barcode for the collective "set" and "borrowed" the black ink cart's barcode to keep Amazon's system happy.

Result is that when we listed the barcode for the black cartridge alone at £1 (or whatever), this was incorrectly associated with and shown as- through absolutely no fault of our own- a set of *four* for the single cart price. Innocent customer thinks he's getting a great price, we think he's buying the black cart alone and send him that, customer complains.

Not the customer's fault, but not ours either. The people to blame were the original third party seller and (arguably) Amazon for letting them get away with that. I can't remember if that was the case where he left bad feedback- it's hard to explain this to the customer without it sounding like a convoluted excuse- and Amazon *did* remove it because we could quite clearly show it wasn't our fault.

Re: "E&OE" exists for this very purpose

"&OE

This means Errors and Omissions Excepted. This is a significant qualification and should not be accepted by the buyer. To accept the statement is leaving the door open to the seller to change any aspect of the quotation. - See more at: http://www.brianfarrington.co.uk/2013/10/certainty-in-an-uncertain-world/#sthash.IuO99Q6g.dpuf

Re: Variable pricing?

"So, sellers happy to profit on the way up, just not on the way down..."

Well, there is a difference: nobody is going to buy a million-dollar cookbook or whatever. It's clearly an algorithm going bonkers. When an algorithm plays a human, and the human knows the algorithm and its flaws, the (sufficiently clever) human will win.

For example, one of Kasparov's victories against one of the Deeps (Deep Blue, Deep Thought, Deep Throat, I don't know which) was because he recognized that the computer will beat him if he uses standard ("book") openings, but by doing something strange (going off book) he can confuse the computer and hope it does something wrong, which it did.

Everything You Need to Know About the L.A.R.E.

Yours for $20 Million ($208k per page)

Re: Variable pricing?

We use CamelCamelCamel as the antidote to Amazon pricing.

Re: "E&OE" caveat that meant such blatant errors

Even with that sort of an exception, the question becomes, "is it a blatant error?" At this time of year a 1p item could be a loss leader, or an attempt to clear merchandise.

For example, and one that will strike most of you Brits as bonkers, I've never much paid a great deal of attention to the price I've paid for turkeys as Thanksgiving. Typical cost for me has been in the neighborhood of $20 for a 20 pound turkey if frozen, about 30% more if "fresh". This year without thinking I pre-ordered from a seller at a local farmers market and put down a $10 deposit. When I picked it up, I had to add another $44 which was initially a bit of a shock. But I thought about it, and considered that they weren't running loss-leader pricing because they ONLY sell poultry, I decided it was fair.

Re: Hang on

But once you have paid and left the store the article is yours It is then up to the supermarket to sort out the problem with the price gun. In this instance the retailer has outsourced pricing to RepricerExpress and the shelf-stacking and checkout to Amazon.. Once the goodsare paid for and despatched, the retailer should be looking at their business model, especially w.r.t. price management.

Why does any algorithm allow the selling price to be less than the purchase price withoiut oversight?

Re: Hang on

Technically the price on the shelf in Tesco is an "invitation to treat". By placing the items on the checkout belt you are making an offer to Tesco to purchase the items at the advertised price. Only once they process your transaction through the till are they accepting your offer and at that point a contract is formed.

Online, the website is the invitation to treat, your order is the offer and generally speaking the dispatch confirmation is the acceptance (point at which the contract is formed).

The problem here comes from taking humans out of the loop. In Tesco, if everything scanned through the till at 1p, the checkout assistant would probably figure out something was wrong and you wouldn't get as far as forming a contract. But if there is an automated system (self checkout maybe, or Amazon's automated dispatch system) performing the acceptance step and forming the contract, there is a risk that that system could go awry and lead to the company forming contracts that they would rather not have done.

Re: If the software was any good hedgefunds would be using it

See the Porsche/VW hedge funds with massive losses. They sued Porsche for billions. And lost. Which is great news for the population of the world minus a few hundred bastards.