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by yoz-y 2320 days ago
Amadeus?

I remember at some point the French computer retailer had an issue when running a "buy 2 get 1 free" offer on blu-rays. One could remove the two bought items from the cart and the free one would remain. Repeat ad-libidum.

Last year Amazon ran an offer where all photographic gear cost $94. All of it, even lenses which retailed for over 13k. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/07/19/amazon-prime-... If there is one regret I have in my life, it was not checking the prime day that fateful morning.

2 comments

I won the lottery on a similar issue. I was looking at monitors on Amazon using a business account, which sometimes offers volume discounts. Instead of a $10 discount, someone had set the unit price to $10 if you bought more than one, for a $1100 monitor. I bought five. I expected the order to be cancelled, but a week later five monitors showed up.
Along the same lines, I was shopping for fuel injectors and someone listed a particular part number at like $1.50ea. So now, years later, I have a peanut butter jar fulled of 24lb/hr EV1 injectors that are not the right flow rate for anything I own but hey, maybe I'll use them eventually. It's nice to find a pricing error but it's rare to be in a position to actually use or be able to re-sell multiple units.
Similarly long ago, a french amazon like site offered (alapage?) a 5e rebate for new customers, one coupon per person, and a person being identified by its delivery (fullname, address) pair. Except that they used string equality as comparison which means every typo combination got you a new account.

Suddenly anything <= 4.99 was open hunt. A month or so later, most item were now 5.01. And possibly uniqueness was now put on credit card number, people can't get more than a handful.

I never could find a figure nor an article in the news but considering how fast this spread around, it was an expensive mistake.