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Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

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Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#301

Post by masonic »

sagebird wrote: post #239

It’s kind of interesting- the asymmetry of moral expectations and entitlement. If you accidentally purchased a bag of M&Ms from Amazon for 500 dollars instead of 5, they will let you undo it. On the other hand, if the matter is reversed, Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss — even if the purchase was made in bad faith (ie- knowing Amazon mis-priced it but purchasing it anyways.) I’m not going to en…

  Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss
In several cases of mine, they just canceled the order. They certainly let FBO resellers flake on "errors". I've bought items that were priced low, bought the entire inventory, then found the order "cancelled" as "out of stock"... only to find the reseller list the exact same item in the same quantity with a new Amazon product number (but the same UPC) at a higher price. I pointed this out to Amazon, who insisted this was fine.

Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#302

Post by londons_explore »

s0rce wrote: post #105
mrep wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a good thing? A "price match" with a bunch of exclusions isn't really a price match.

But an online store that makes a pricing error and then potentially reverts it without shipping the goods shouldn't necessarily be priced matched by other retailers. 99.3% discount isn't reasonable...

Some businesses are built around that.

99percentoffsale.com

Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#303

Post by datarake »

sagebird wrote: post #239

It’s kind of interesting- the asymmetry of moral expectations and entitlement. If you accidentally purchased a bag of M&Ms from Amazon for 500 dollars instead of 5, they will let you undo it. On the other hand, if the matter is reversed, Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss — even if the purchase was made in bad faith (ie- knowing Amazon mis-priced it but purchasing it anyways.) I’m not going to en…

accidentally? I don't think so. Just take a look at this thread and the other hundred of sites where this news was on the first page... n x (13k-0.1k) is much less than the amount of money necessary for a such advertising campaign

Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#304

Post by jspash »

sagebird wrote: post #239

It’s kind of interesting- the asymmetry of moral expectations and entitlement. If you accidentally purchased a bag of M&Ms from Amazon for 500 dollars instead of 5, they will let you undo it. On the other hand, if the matter is reversed, Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss — even if the purchase was made in bad faith (ie- knowing Amazon mis-priced it but purchasing it anyways.) I’m not going to en…

This reminds me of a quandary we found ourselves in when my company first started selling on the Amazon Marketplace.

We produce & sell art prints. We had just signed a new supplier of images (a well-known auction house) who decided to release the rights to photographs of all the items they've sold over the past 50-100 years. Great! New images that the world has probably never seen. It's always good to get a new range in, especially when it comes with an established name.

So we pipe in their data feed into our system. And out it goes in the Amazon data feed without a hitch. But we hadn't yet eyeballed the data or images.

Long story short, we ended up selling things like a "Pure silver antique tea pot. circa 1890" "French hand-sewn wedding dress. Turn of the century" "Two wooden panels found in Syrian tomb 1200A.D. with gold leaf detail" etc. £19.95 each!! The list goes on.

In the beginning customers were quite understanding as long we cancelled the order with an explanation before it shipped. But a few "antiques" were indeed printed and sent to customers. Rolled up in a brown cardboard tube. Disappointing to say the least.

Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#305

Post by rawTruthHurts »

sagebird wrote: post #239

It’s kind of interesting- the asymmetry of moral expectations and entitlement. If you accidentally purchased a bag of M&Ms from Amazon for 500 dollars instead of 5, they will let you undo it. On the other hand, if the matter is reversed, Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss — even if the purchase was made in bad faith (ie- knowing Amazon mis-priced it but purchasing it anyways.) I’m not going to en…

It doesn't need to be Amazon: had such mistake been made by a small law-abiding worker-rights-observant webshop, people would still find moral arguments to justify "it's their right".

I despise Amazon as the next man, and would have loved to take advantage of the mistake; but, on double standards, this subthread is king.

Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#306

Post by danbruc »

kartan wrote: post #288
sagebird wrote: post #239

It’s kind of interesting- the asymmetry of moral expectations and entitlement. If you accidentally purchased a bag of M&Ms from Amazon for 500 dollars instead of 5, they will let you undo it. On the other hand, if the matter is reversed, Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss — even if the purchase was made in bad faith (ie- knowing Amazon mis-priced it but purchasing it anyways.) I’m not going to en…

> It’s kind of interesting- the asymmetry of moral expectations and entitlement. First, there is an asymmetry in power too. Amazon can afford to double check or triple check everything if it makes economic sense. Secondly, companies does not have morals. If you allow big corporations to change prices as they see fit because there is a "mistake". Companies will exploit that to their advantage with psychopathic precisi…

Companies are not human beings, as other comments already have said, to involve morality in this issue makes no sense whatsoever.

This argument is wrong, there is no attempt to associate morality with a company. It is the customer and only the customer holding the arguably conflicting believes that errors in favour of customers should not be corrected while errors in favour of the company should be corrected. So you can argue whether those two believes are actually morally conflicting but you can not dismiss this point based on the irrelevant point that one can not apply moral concepts to companies [1].

[1] Which may itself be a matter of dabate, after all one aspect of companies is that they are collections of people working together.

Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#307

Post by TeMPOraL »

ultrarunner wrote: post #266
sgift wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is not a person, it's a company. Attributing moral to a transaction with non-person entities is frail itself. Does moral even apply here? What does it mean?

Someone is responsible for that listing and the pricing it receives. The company operates collectively, but there is ultimately a human behind each sale. OP seems to be interested in the morality surrounding the treatment of the people involved, not the legal entity they’ve invented.

> The company operates collectively, but there is ultimately a human behind each sale.

Yes and no. Companies are "greater than sum of its parts" beings. Trading with "Roy's Used Camera Gear" sole proprietorship is essentially dealing with Roy himself. I'd say morality and basic human decency strongly applies on both sides here. A megacorporation of Amazon size? There you're dealing with an amoral artificial intelligence that uses humans as brain cells and bureaucracy as brain activity. This being does not follow any moral principles, and will happily screw you over whenever it's profitable for them.

Humans are involved in every activity of a corporation the way our neurons are involved in thinking; you don't say that neuron #24262934 is stupid because all it keeps thinking about is kitties. That neuron only conveys signals, and the thought originates and evolves across many of them. This also implies one is not absolved from moral responsibility to individual agents of a corporation. It's not the fault of a sales representative or a helpdesk clerk that the corporation made decisions that hurt you, much like it's not a single neuron's fault that your brain keeps thinking about cats.

Same thing in other words: a market entity seems to have two aspects - the human aspect, and the "emergent" aspect that's manifestation of market pressures incentivizing members of that entity. The human aspect is in scope of moral considerations, the market-emergent aspect isn't. As a company grows in size, the human aspect diminishes while the market aspect takes over.

(Note that this is a perspective I'm currently entertaining, but I haven't thought it through as thoroughly as I'd like. It seems to be a correct intuition, but it may have inconsistencies that I haven't realized yet.)

Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#308

Post by jamessb »

There was a similar incident in 2001:

> Amazon messes up a 'Buy this camera and get that bag free" promotion to be "Buy this bag and get that camera free." As a result you can get a $350 Minolta Maxxum SLR for $40.

https://www.metafilter.com/12512/#178067

Re: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13k Camera Gear for $100 on Prime Day

#309

Post by blue_devil »

sagebird wrote: post #239

It’s kind of interesting- the asymmetry of moral expectations and entitlement. If you accidentally purchased a bag of M&Ms from Amazon for 500 dollars instead of 5, they will let you undo it. On the other hand, if the matter is reversed, Amazon is expected to be a good sport and take the loss — even if the purchase was made in bad faith (ie- knowing Amazon mis-priced it but purchasing it anyways.) I’m not going to en…

The price of the goods is negligible. Amazon just got the best PR with this. Millions more people will be spending millions of hours sifting through deals any time there's some kind of Deal Day.
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