What should an online seller do about "errors"?

WINE TALK
1

Here’s the story, and it has nothing to do with 1950 Le Gay.

Without outing the vendor, the basics are:

Searching winesearcher today for something and noticed an absurdly high single bottle price and and equally absurdly low case price for the same wine. The case price was less than the single bottle price. So, I checked the seller’s actual website and low and behold the price is there, so I order 2 cases and hope for the best. Several hours later I get a call, from someone who I could barely understand and who I think had trouble understanding me, who said that it was a programming error, and the best that they could do for me was a 10% case discount. Since this was a web transaction and my credit card was likely already charged, what responsibility does the seller have to honor the purchase? Or at least offer a decent discount?

Notes:
I knew it was a ridiculous deal, but I did buy '05 Palmer at Costco once for $99 so one never knows.
The entire website was a hack, in asp, that seemed as if it may have been done as someone’s school project, but I didn’t exploit anything, I simply added the items to my cart and submitted the order.

Thoughts?

2

I recently saw some seemingly low prices at one online merchant, so I put them in my cart and emailed, asking if they were mislabeled. They wrote back that the prices were right, so I ordered.

Entry mistakes happen and I think that it is absurd to hold a retailer to them. That said, I do think a retailer should (but is not under obligation to) offer a reasonable discount beyond the standard 10%.

3

I was on RETAILER.com today. Saw 2005 Le Pin, normally $6000.00/bottle on sale for $4.00/bottle. I went into their on-line chat - asked the AGENT if RETILER has a policy of not honoring "obvious’ mistakes on the website. AGENT asked me to what I was referring. I pasted the product id. I stated that if they are $4/each I would take the remaining 14 bottles (which were in my cart). AGENT asked me to hold on. The price in my cart changed to $67,200 - the updated price of $4800.00 (new on-sale price).

From my chat:
AGENT> Ok, it is a grievous mistake and as such we cannot honor the pricing
AGENT> It’s being corrected as we speak.

So, I almost had 14 bottles of 2005 Le Pin for $56, but I was not going to pay the additional $67,144.


The WORST part of it - AGENT “disconnected” the chat without even a thank you…

Is a “thank you” too much anymore?


(Retailer & Agent’s name are masked)

4

Why do you assume that you have been charged? Quite the opposite, most retailers don’t have real time functioning websites and your order just gets queued up until someone manually goes in and processes it.

This road has been well-traveled. You have no real recourse other than to out them and suggest that people not do business with them or just fuggataboutit.

5

I now know it had been charged because I got an email about 2 minutes ago with the refund information.

6

Whatever happened to the golden rule?

7

Great story, John.

8

1950 Le Gay [rofl.gif]

9

Darryl,

Do you honestly believe you should get those wines? Clearly a mistake.

Why even post this, unless posted for comedic value.

10

I thought this was an invitation to pileon

11

Thanks for getting the joke portion of my post

12

While I’d expected them not to honor the entire purchase, they did charge my credit card, so my question was genuine, what should have been done. However apparently that’s been answered here before and I missed it, so laugh away as Ian did at the Le Gay reference. newhere

13

They should have done what they did - refund. You know this if you have any ethical sense.

14

I think we all got the Le Gay joke, but I found the Le Pin story even better!

It is frustrating being a wine retailer online. Nevertheless, they did refund your money immediately, so no real harm done.

15

There is no reason to out them. It was an obvious data entry mistake. Seems silly to out someone for that.

16

…or to think that a “counter offer” would be something someone would expect in this situation. It would have been “bad enough” to have received the wine, let alone not getting it and then expecting a “reward” for finding their error and trying to prey on it. Man, unreal. [scratch.gif]

17

I would just threaten that you are going to out them on this bulletin board. Tell them that you are the most important blogger of whatever wine you were trying to purchase…and see where that takes you! Might get you a free six pack of pepsi

18

Only if I used an alias I suppose

19

Tell that to Jeff Leve… [oops.gif] [thankyou.gif]