Amazon UK Sellers Hit by Nightmare Before Christmas

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Amazon UK suffered from a devastating glitch last night that listed prices incorrectly for over an hour. The glitch was with RepriceExpress software that keeps Amazon’s prices the lowest, that somehow experienced a meltdown and listed expensive products as low as a penny. The glitch was reported to Amazon by one of its main competitors.

“We got a call from a competitor to say ‘do you realize all your listings at a penny?’ By the end of the hour, we had 1,600 orders,” he said. “People were buying 10, 50, 100 copies of everything. It is £50,000, £60,000, £100,000 of stock; we can’t even work it out.”
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TFA said:
From 7-8pm on Friday, software used by third-party sellers to ensure their products are the cheapest on the market went a bit haywire and reduced prices to as little as 1p.

Sellers rounded on RepricerExpress, whose website boasts that it provides “the ridiculously simple way to increase your Amazon holiday sales”.
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Third party sellers using third party software to sell on Amazon.

Sorry guys, but if something doesn't have the option for you to set a MINIMUM price when you're letting it change how much you sell your stuff for, i can't say I have any real sympathy. Especially when you're using tools outside of the Amazon ecosystem.
 
techrat said:
Third party sellers using third party software to sell on Amazon.

Sorry guys, but if something doesn't have the option for you to set a MINIMUM price when you're letting it change how much you sell your stuff for, i can't say I have any real sympathy. Especially when you're using tools outside of the Amazon ecosystem.
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It does allow you to set a minimum.
according to this: http://support.repricerexpress.com/hc/en-us/articles/201066071-How-Do-I-Set-Min-Max-

but that's how bugs work, bugs don't follow the rules
 
I wonder if they will honor the orders. Some smaller retailers might go out of business.
 
This is could be very interesting tax-wise because Amazon UK is technically a fulfilment company for Amazon Luxemburg and pays very little UK tax and under UK law the price on the sticker is technically an invitation to tender. So if they try to use that to get out of those sales, then they'll subject themselves to full UK taxes.
 
I think I found one this morning. TP-LINK 16 port gigabit switches going for £11 each. When I came back from a customers it was back to £68.00.
 
This was just covered on BBC Radio 2 and a seller who spoke on the station said he had been lightly hit compared to some, they held most their own stock so could cancel most orders but a few items are fulfilled by Amazon for them. This included a mobile phone where it had dropped to 1p and a person bought 60 and it got dispatched, he said it'll cost him about £1600 although two things he said is that due to cancelling so many orders his approval/listing rating will drop and he has to pay Amazon something like £60 commission on those sales.

In essence in the UK any company can refuse to sell something to you at the wrong price, although if it is dispatched there is little you can do about it.
 
Can't wait for the torrent of douchebags to come in screaming that these prices should be honored and the losses considered the penalty of doing business :rolleyes:
 
It does remind one of the old joke, "To err is human, to really foul things up takes a computer" ... sounds like Amazon caught most of the errors before they shipping and isn't charging the sellers fees ... for the looters that tried to capitalize on an obvious mistake and then had their orders cancelled, tough rockos :)
 
Most news sites report this as an "Amazon glitch" and even commenters here say things like how "Amazon can get out of these sales" etc. This is not related to Amazon and it is not their fault if they are so efficient that some orders had already gone through. The affected sellers were using 3rd party software called "Reprice Express" to automatically adjust their prices. Also, it is definitely not a computer error but a huge human programming error. Also, the fix seems to have taken quite a while. I am reading that after one hour they managed to have their software stop adding low prices and several more hours to revert prices back to previous levels. It is a miracle this company has survived 10 years with the levels of incompetence displayed here.
 
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