William Robb wrote: >I asked you once, I'll ask you again: If you walked into a store to buy a >quart of milk and when you get to the counter you are told the price that is >clearly marked on the bottle as pr quart is actually per pint, and therefore >you will have to pay double, would you do so happily? >If you'd care to, answer me this time. > >In essence, this is what B&H has done, and it is what you, Mark, Godfrey and >(most unfortunately) Henry is defending.
Bill, you're equating a physical store with a virtual store. There seems to be a tacit assumption that online stores can or should work just like physical stores. This is, in and of itself, untrue. They don't. They can't. They shouldn't. Here's how a mis-priced item is handled in a physical store: You sell the product to the customer for the price marked and eat the loss. That's the right thing to do and it's also the law in many places (it was in New York State when I lived there). Then you go back onto the sales floor and correct the price. This isn't viable in an online store because in the time it takes to ring up the sale and walk back to the sales area of the physical store the customer in the virtual store has announced his bargain through Twitter, Facebook, Woot, etc. and the mis-priced product has been ordered by 100 other people. Or 200. Or 800. B&H's servers can probably handle several hundred orders a *minute*. Consider an expensive item that's not underpriced by a mere 50% but with a mis-placed decimal point (it's been known to happen) that effectively underprices it by 90%... and is ordered by 1000 or so people before the mistake is discovered. Consider a web site that's been hacked and products re-priced: If the law treated any of these like a physical store, they'd be obliged to sell everything at the marked price until they noticed and fixed each erroneous price (good luck "proving" it was hackers who did it - or, if you're an aggrieved customer, proving that hackers *didn't* do it when the seller claims that was the case). Mark Cassino's web page was hacked not long ago - they were trying to upload trojans to site visitors but they could just as easily have re-priced everything he sells. Are there any online retailers who *do* guarantee that they'll sell for the price that's advertised in their online store even if it's an error? Find one. I haven't been able to. Look at the places that offer to match competitors' prices (buy.com, for example): They specifically state that they'll only match *correct* prices - they know *none* of their competitors will actually sell at an erroneous price, and they know pricing errors are a realistic possibility so they want to be protected, too. The marking of a price on an item on the shelf of a physical store carries with it a kind of contractual obligation between the store and the customer. The advertised price in a virtual store, on the other hand, is treated as "informational" like the price in a printed advertisement; subject to change or retraction in the case of errors. Many practices that work in the physical world don't scale to the speed, volume and security threats of the online environment. As far as I can tell there are *no* online retailers who promise to sell for the price advertised on the web site even if it's wrong. This is one of the policies that simply isn't workable in the virtual world. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
