€28 PCs for sale in Dell web pricing blunder

Dell has revealed that a pricing blunder at its Irish online store led to it inadvertently selling PCs for €100 or less.

The company said that on Thursday human error led to an incorrect price being posted on its Irish store. One Dell Dimension system was featured, retailing at the incorrect price of €111.61. Given the fact that customers can customise their systems, options selected by the individual customer meant the price could have appeared as low as €28.

According to Dell, the correct retail price should have been €1,116.10 including VAT and delivery. The company said that the error was quickly identified and rectified by its pricing monitoring team. A system is in place to identify irregular purchasing patterns on the site.

However, the 90 per cent discount was in place long enough for several hundred orders to be placed. The company said that approximately 430 people ordered the incorrectly priced system. It will be contacting these customers over the next 24 hours to advise them of the situation.

Dell said that it sincerely regretted the error, but stated that it was not legally obliged to honour this price as all orders submitted to Dell are subject to order confirmation with customers and this was a clear and obvious mistake to all concerned.

"Our automatic email acknowledgement of receipt of orders also points out that we are not responsible for typographical or other errors, and that we reserve the right to cancel any orders resulting from such errors," a statement said.

It also said that it would offer customers the choice of cancelling their order, or ordering at the correct price.

Word of the pricing gaffe spread quickly over the internet. Several visitors to online bulletin boards claimed that they had ordered machines with some individuals claiming they had ordered several machines.

This is not the first time that an error such as this has occurred with an online retailer. In some instances, particularly in the early days of web commerce, vendors honoured the original price for customers. Last year in the UK, Kodak sold a number of digital cameras to consumers at an incorrect price. In that case however, the camera manufacturer had issued order confirmation to the customers concerned.

In other cases such as the Thai Airways and Amazon.com web pricing blunders, customers have not been so lucky.

Dick O'Brien writes for ElectricNews.net