Posted on 25-Mar-2003 23:06
| Filed under: News
: Computing
"If Dixons were to print the wrong price label for a computer and put it on their shelves at £7.99 instead of £799 then two things would happen.
First, any customers who called over a sales assistant to buy one of the bargains would be informed that the price was a mistake. Second, we would not hear about it because such pricing mistakes are both common and uninteresting.
But when Amazon's UK site advertised iPaq Pocket PCs for £7.32 instead of the normal price of £300, the news circulated so fast by e-mail that thousands of orders were placed, with some people buying 50 or more.
The UK site was eventually taken offline for about an hour while it was all sorted out, partly because of the sheer volume of people trying to buy at this ridiculously low price."