Amazon pricing error leaves store off-line for almost 1hr.

[edesignuk]

Oh dear, Amazon made a mistake in their pricing, which in order to rectify left the store off-line for almost 1hr!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2864461.stm

 

[Doctor Q]

I'll bet that Amazon UK lost more money from being down for an hour than they would have lost from selling the Hewlett Packard pocket computers at the wrong price. I wonder why they couldn't just pull one item instead of taking the site down?

 

[edesignuk]

Originally posted by Doctor Q
I wonder why they couldn't just pull one item instead of taking the site down?

Yup, very odd. You'd think they have the ability to remove an item at the click of a button, just as they would to add one. I mean, they don't take the entire store down every time they want to add/remove items normally. There must have been something else wrong to force them to shut it down....I wonder what it was though...???

 

[MrMacMan]

silly silly them.

Almost reminds me of some of the other recent mac site errors.
1250 Dual GHZ Powermac... etc...

 

[hvfsl]

Originally posted by Doctor Q
I'll bet that Amazon UK lost more money from being down for an hour than they would have lost from selling the Hewlett Packard pocket computers at the wrong price. I wonder why they couldn't just pull one item instead of taking the site down?

I wish I had known, I was looking to get one of those pocket pcs today. Maybe I could have got one before they closed the site. I have managed to get cheap stuff off websites before because of errors. Last year I got a geforce 4Ti (PC) for £70 instead of £170. Companies only notice there is a problem when you get people who buy lots of them.

 

[Xero]

man speaking of big online store sites getting dropped like a bad habit, Musiciansfriend.com went up in smoke RIGHT when i started to order my new audio interface, man was that annoying. all youd get when trying to get to the site was a big fat Apache internal server error. luckely the VXPocket v2 i ordered was still about $500 off of the retail price when the site came back up.

i wonder what kind of revenue sites like this actually loose? even for a short period of time, im guessing itd be quite a bit.