Need Opinion on a Unique Situation

[PortlandRox]

I have quite an interesting situation going and hopefully there is someone out there with some unique online experience. I recently visited the website for a vendor that gets mentioned on this board fairly frequently. This particular company has an online store and also takes orders through their website.

I had read that they carried the setting I have been looking for, so I visited their site to compare their price to a local BBB store. I did a search to find the setting I wanted and on the "search results" page, it listed the price for the setting as $1925. I clicked "Add to My Cart" and when I did this, I was amazed to see that my subtotal only showed $1! I was curious, so I continued the checkout process and every screen I went to (including the final screen that had the shipping costs, tax, etc), the price was still just $1.

Now, this is obviously a glitch in their website (unless they are feeling particularly generous), but I''m curious...if someone were to go through and place the order, get a valid order number, print out the screen, etc, would the store have to honor it at that price?

 

[Lorelei]

Absolutely not I'm afraid, most websites have a disclaimer stating this, but even if not they won't honour it. This happens quite a lot due to typos or other errors. If you try, it will get picked up somewhere along the line then you will still have to pay the full price, they are running a business after all.

 

[mrssalvo]

i agree with lorelei. most sites have a disclaimer somewhere that says they will not honor pricing errors etc...would be nice though

 

[Lorelei]

A girl can dream.........

especially if it is a 3 carat for a dollar

 

[SoonIHope]

I know this isn''t an appropriate example, but I was once buying some pants at the Gap for $60 and the scanner just picked it up at $7. The cashier looked confused, commented that the pants had just come in that day so there was no way that they were on sale yet, and gave them to me at the lower price anyway. Then my friend who was with me asked if she could get the lower price on them too and she said "as long as you don''t tell my manager" so my friend ran to grab her size. BUT when the cashier scanned those pants it came in at the regular price. Since she knew that the only reason my friend was buying them was because they were so cheap, she manually entered in the item number from MY pants to get the $7 price for her too, thus losing the store a total of $106 for our two pairs of pants!!! Just purely out of being nice and not caring about getting in trouble since she knew it was a computing error, not that she was giving out random discounts to friends or anything. But still nice of her.

But I agree, there''s no way that the website would be willing to honor something like that when a larger amount of money is at stake and they have a way to track you down individually, unlike when you buy pants with cash in the store. So my comment isn''t actually helpful at all...

but I thought it was amusing!

 

[VegasAngel]

HaHa I would try to order it. Why not? You know they probably wont honor it but hey if you were going to order it anyway it doesnt matter, maybe they will give you discount or throw in something for free, thats what we had to do at my place of employment when it came to internet errors.

 

[Lorelei]

Nice idea, but it doesn''t usually work with these situations, I doubt the vendors would give a discount as it happens so often, you see this a lot when looking at online vendors.

 

[portoar]

I ran into a pricing error just a few days ago from a PS vendor . . . shopping for my .8 ctw earrings and found a .4 carat diamond for $10,008! I emailed the vendor about the error (actually, I think I bought this stone, but I didn''t pay $10,008 for it!)

 

[VegasAngel]

They should be able to something. My employer had all kinds of disclaimers on the website, it didn''t stop them from making exceptions or trying to fix a wrong, especially when you have a customer who doesnt care what kind of disclaimers you have on the site. All the customer knows is there is an error and either you will honor it or work something out.

Sometimes after having them on the phone for an hour, cussing me out and telling me I was incompetent, I hated honoring anything for them. Just to make myself feel better, I would put them on mute, cuss them out, and give them the finger.

It all boils down to customer service. They are probably not going to honor $1 but they should be able to lower the price a little bit.

 

[Lorelei]

I do see what you are saying VegasAngel, but like I said this happens a lot and I don't know if sometimes it is even the vendors that put these stones up for sale but the cutting houses, especially with virtual stones. I don't think a discount is going to happen in these cases, you see it all the time, plus I have had experience of it too. I don't know if any of the vendors would chime in here? As it happens so much, I can't see they could possibly do it when they are operating on such slim margins anyway.

 

[recran]

Haha I found the exact same "problem" - found an ACA diamond at WhiteFlash for $1. I emailed them to tell them to fix it. There was a big scandal re Ballard Designs a couple months ago - a coupon code for a free $25 got loose and there were thousands of orders. BD ended up giving away LOTS of its cheap stuff and customers only paid for shipping. But there''s a big difference between $25 and $1000!