Nice. I’m still surprised the manager had the authority to sell the product below cost, “price match” aside. I worked in retail early in my career. My experience was that the big ticket items had the smallest margins. That’s why we had to push accessories (cables, cases, stands, etc) and particularly extended warranties whenever we sold a computer. The warranties were huge margins. If we sold a $200 warranty it cost the company about $80 so $120 was the margin. We got big commissions (like $20) for selling warranties.
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Deals: M1 iPad Air Hits Record-Low Prices at TigerDirect, Starting at $313.99 (48% Off)
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Well, 2% of 0 is 0 by my math...
Same here. I placed 3 orders for 3 different devices in hopes that they honor at least 1. If so, I’ll be on the Marketplace here.
I used Rakuten instead and already got my 2% commission / cashback. 🤷♂️
Although these deals seem too good to be true, consider this, TD is not a bedroom operation, they absolutely have a systems team that will work 24/7 to resolve whatever threat the site would potentially be facing. These deals are by no means a secret at this point, well known the web over, if you know about it, they absolutely know about it. But I do agree with many on here, something is off about it, at the very least there should be a previous price in grey with a strike through it.
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I bought one of these, but I'm going to send it back. There is something wrong with the charging connector. None of my Lightning cables will fit.
Excellent prices. Hopefully the orders are fulfilled.
It's definitely wrong. The recent M2 MBA w/ 16GB is selling for $707 while the lower config M1 MBA w/ 8GB from 2020 is selling for $979.
haha i guess you really have no clue how those things work. Someone in ops fat fingered or did a wrong update that caused those price mistakes, since it's weekend at best you got few IT guys pretend to be working doing production support which is mostly focused to make sure the website is running. No-one is looking at the prices trying to figure out or even know it's happening. Since the order goes to "review" status, i assume they have some kind of verification step before shipping which will catch it on monday.
All i know is some poor operation schmuck will get fired over this, and PayPal / amazon pay will likely stop servicing TD until they get on the call with each other to sort this out after the mass refund / complaints monday.
I dont pity the ops team coming on monday that have to deal with this. Some of the best buy managers you guys managed to scam over to get those prices will likely get in trouble too.
All thanks for macrumors, great job lol
How do you know what Best Buy's cost is? What if there's some program to push these (by Apple)? Apple is completely opaque about their costs and profits... So I'd question anyone who thinks they know.
Friendly FYI. You don’t earn cash back on iPads for tiger direct on Rakuten.
I don’t know what Best Buy’s cost is. But I do know what Apple told the SEC what its profit margins were. And since Apple undoubtedly sells to Best Buy at below its MSRP but above its cost I can make an educated guess that Best Buy can’t give a 48% discount off MSRP on a brand new product or even one released six months ago.
I'm sorry, I should never have written that post... gagaliya knows all and knows exactly what happened here, anyone else who dares to speculate on an open discussion forum is clueless, we have now been enlightened as to what happened and foretold exactly what will happen in the future!
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Think where you're going wrong here is Apple's profit margin isn't based off MSRP. It is based off their own costs and the price they sell to retailers at. Apple also appears to utilize a MAP (minimum advertised pricing) policy since nearly everyone's prices are always within $100 or so of Apple's MSRP.
So, saying that, I will agree with you that retailers aren't giving up a 48% discount off new products. My guess is we've inadvertently gotten a glimpse in to the retail cost of these items. Wouldn't be surprised if some newb intern mistakenly entered the cost price in to the sale price boxes.
Seems plausible, but all the $XX9.99 prices all look like retail prices, not a retailer's cost. Suppliers doesn't usually price like that to their retailers.
Obviously all speculation on my part, but they also might have an added rule in place that anything entered as a 'sale' price defaults to ending in 99?
I work for an ecommerce business as well and have accidentally pushed out incorrect pricing myself in the past. Would love to be a fly on their wall to hear what happened here.
These guys estimate the MBA cost at $683 for Apple. If true the most recent M2 MBA would be in a similar ballpark but higher due to inflation. This is what it costs Apple to make. Then they have to add in their margin before selling to TD. Selling a M2 MBA for $707 means they would be losing significant money on every sale. Given that it's a recent release there's no reason for a fire sale. When you combine this with the fact that they are currently selling an older and lower spec'ed MBA for significantly more than the recent M2 MBA everything points to an incorrect pricing. Even without detailed analysis I would think most people here have a sensitive enough "caveat emptor detector" to know that these prices are way too good to be true.
Your theory would mean retail has better margins then AAPL saying this 48% discount is their cost. Not even close, this is an error. Best Buy as an example averaged 3.2% margins over last 10 years.
Retail margins are razor thin. Low single digits is about right. No retailer sells hardware for around 50% margins. They need to make money by selling the much more profitable accessories and warranty.
I call bs, show us the receipt. Especially with the amount you got, no way they didn’t red flag that right away
Company-wide directive went out pretty early in the day to stop allowing price matching on TigerDirect, but there are multiple reports of people squeaking through some matches before that directive went out. Not surprised at all that he got all that stuff. Really wish I’d been quicker on the draw.
On other forums the consensus is that the new owner of TD is basically harvesting email addresses and payment methods for some reason or another. Or, they're justdriving a ton of traffic to their site so people remember them.
All the orders will be cancelled due to a pricing mistake.
The price has nothing to do with margins, cost, MAP, etc. It's just how TD does business.