10-22-2009, 01:16 AM
There was the time there was a price mistake on a nice monitor, and buy.com went ahead and charged everybody's credit cards, and took about six weeks to refund the charges. So long, in fact, that I had to pay the bill to the credit card company while waiting to see if mine would actually ship.
I didn't want to dispute the charge because they still weren't saying whether they'd honor the price. Some people lucky enough to have a soapbox -- like a well-known website, or a published magazine column -- got their monitors, even though they'd clearly ordered after most of us unlucky shlubs. Meanwhile, buy.com claimed they were out of stock, but if you wanted to pay the regular price, they had plenty in the warehouse. Go figure.
They had no price mistake disclaimer, by the way. None at all. Then they went and retroactively amended their disclaimer to include price mistakes, and tried to claim that it had been there all along. However, many people (myself included) had screen caps of all the fine print.
I forget the details, but it was something like a $500 monitor for $200. A great deal, but not like 90% off. At the time, they were famous for these crazy, loss leader deals, and so it was certainly plausible. They were encouraging the frenzies.
When all the dust settled, they started a new marketing feature: Price Mistake of the Day. Charming, eh?
I won't ever buy anything from them. I write polite letters to sites like dealmac and consumerist, asking them to reconsider listing buy.com "deals."
In a pleasant twist, I was working at a high school when this all happened. A couple months later, I heard about an approved purchase order for something like $75,000 from buy.com. I got it canceled.
I didn't want to dispute the charge because they still weren't saying whether they'd honor the price. Some people lucky enough to have a soapbox -- like a well-known website, or a published magazine column -- got their monitors, even though they'd clearly ordered after most of us unlucky shlubs. Meanwhile, buy.com claimed they were out of stock, but if you wanted to pay the regular price, they had plenty in the warehouse. Go figure.
They had no price mistake disclaimer, by the way. None at all. Then they went and retroactively amended their disclaimer to include price mistakes, and tried to claim that it had been there all along. However, many people (myself included) had screen caps of all the fine print.
I forget the details, but it was something like a $500 monitor for $200. A great deal, but not like 90% off. At the time, they were famous for these crazy, loss leader deals, and so it was certainly plausible. They were encouraging the frenzies.
When all the dust settled, they started a new marketing feature: Price Mistake of the Day. Charming, eh?
I won't ever buy anything from them. I write polite letters to sites like dealmac and consumerist, asking them to reconsider listing buy.com "deals."
In a pleasant twist, I was working at a high school when this all happened. A couple months later, I heard about an approved purchase order for something like $75,000 from buy.com. I got it canceled.