I've noticed more and more online retailers doing this. 'Accidentally' mispricing things, to get a lot of traffic on their site, people buy, and might well buy something else at the same time. Then they turn around and go 'Oops, misprice, sorry, we're not selling you it at this price after all'.
HMV are particularly bad for it. But Amazon seem to be following suit.
You might be right... but not necessarily. I know this from when I worked at WHSmiths for a month.
Lots of retailers - high street and online - change their prices around very frequently. This is especially true just before Christmas, btw. What happens is, if something is not selling so great at the moment, they drop the price so their stocks move faster. Then, if something is selling really well, they go " hey, maybe we can price this one higher... it seems to be moving" and raise the prices again.
When I worked at Smiths over Christmas, they would change the prices several times a week on some items. It caused us no end of problems. One, because they never told us so we could update the prices - we would only notice once we scanned things through the till. And secondly - imagine if you're a customer and you notice on Wednesday that a shop is selling Spiderman 3 for £9.99. "Oh cool," you think, I'll pop in when I get paid on Friday and pick it up. That's a pretty decent price." Then you get there on Friday and it's £19.98. "WTF?!" you say to the till staff. "Sorry," they say. "It went up."
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carisma_sensei
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Date: 2007-11-10 10:40 am (UTC)HMV are particularly bad for it. But Amazon seem to be following suit.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 11:05 am (UTC)Lots of retailers - high street and online - change their prices around very frequently. This is especially true just before Christmas, btw. What happens is, if something is not selling so great at the moment, they drop the price so their stocks move faster. Then, if something is selling really well, they go " hey, maybe we can price this one higher... it seems to be moving" and raise the prices again.
When I worked at Smiths over Christmas, they would change the prices several times a week on some items. It caused us no end of problems. One, because they never told us so we could update the prices - we would only notice once we scanned things through the till. And secondly - imagine if you're a customer and you notice on Wednesday that a shop is selling Spiderman 3 for £9.99. "Oh cool," you think, I'll pop in when I get paid on Friday and pick it up. That's a pretty decent price." Then you get there on Friday and it's £19.98. "WTF?!" you say to the till staff. "Sorry," they say. "It went up."
no subject
Date: 2007-11-10 11:11 am (UTC)I remain constantly amazed at the multiple infinite ways that managers find to screw up everything they touch.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-13 08:01 am (UTC)