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A fault with Amazon listing software last week, saw many items sold through the retail giant by smaller businesses listed at just £0.01 each. While it only lasted for about an hour on Friday, bargain hunters on the site ordered tens of copies of expensive items like video games, mobile mobiles and mattresses. Unfortunately for the affected companies, Amazon's warehouse system has become so self-sufficient, that many orders were shipped out before the error could be spotted, losing the affected businesses tens of thousands of pounds.
While Amazon did say in an email to those affected, that it had managed to cancel the majority of orders, many businesses either didn't notice the problem until all of their stock had been shipped out, or couldn't get in touch with Amazon because its telephone support team had gone home for the day.
“Psst, hey. You're going bankrupt in the new year. Sorry about that.”
Now though, they're turning on the company behind the listing software, RepricerExpress, which is designed to make automatic discounts to people's listings in order to keep them competitive during big sale periods around major holidays. Many are now claiming to be talking with solicitors and the Citizen's Advice Bureau about receiving compensation, as a number of businesses now face bankrupcty after selling out tens of thousands of pounds worth of stock for less than £5.
Brendan Doherty, the CEO of RepricerExpress, said in a statement (via The Guardian): “I am truly sorry for the distress this has caused our customers. We understand that you are angry and upset and we will endeavour to work to make good on this issue and to work to restore your confidence in our product and service.”
While the outcome of this particular fallout should be interesting, it may also affect the use of repricing tools on Amazon and other sites in the future. This could have a big knock on effect.
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KitGuru Says: This is pretty horrible for those businesses affected. Here's hoping they get some sort of resolution before Christmas.
How about a feature that says “minimum price to drop this product to” and set it to at least the amount they paid for the stock 🙂
If this is already in there and the software messed up then surely somebody’s insurance somewhere along the line will make this mistake go away? Fingers crossed…
sellers do have that option but chose not to use it.
then the idiots can only blame themselves
I like how Amazon is shirking any responsibility, they used the software and never had proper support to notice the huge price cuts on items, it would have shown up as 99.9999% and that itself should have alerted staff.
So instead of saying sorry to businesses in the form of monetary compensation they shifted the blame to the developers of the software.
Fecking Amazon, as shoddy as how they treat their work force.
this was a fault of a third party company, not by amazon, the third party company should be responsible.
They were at fault also yes, but Amazon is also at fault for using that software so the public could use it, and without them checking things before launch they have essentially caused this incident also.
The software had a bug that has obviously appeared at a specific time and method used on the site for it to happen, now the developers of the software wouldn’t have been able to forsee this so easily as they had no idea that what Amazon had done to their own system at that time would cause the error, but as said they have a smaller responsibility than Amazon who should have tested the software extensively before public release.