how pixmania dealt with price blunder

A few days ago i stumbled upon a great deal – a blu ray dvd player for €1.05 “I’ll have some of that” i said to myself So i went ahead and ordered it on pixmania.com for about €16 incl shipping.

Was it a mistake? Was it genuine? Was is a cunning plan to get some publicity? I didn’t care. If i see something that’s good value and i can afford it and can find a use for it, i’ll buy it, like most people. Do i care about mistakes i didn’t make? No. So once i’d placed my order, the ball was in pixmania’s court. I could sit back, relax and watch the inevitable mess that would unfold 🙂

I knew that if pixmania failed to honour my order, i’d get a ‘sorry’ reply along the lines of “Tough luck, we can cancel this order under section 2357.256a of our terms and conditions, better luck next time, smartass”.

After i’d ordered, i got a confirmation email and then another email a day later saying the item was out of stock but i’d get it as soon as it came back in. Then the day after that i got this email;

Subject: Request for refund

Dear Sean,

We wish to inform you that your refund request for order CCL116465043 is currently being processed.

You will receive a confirmation by email shortly.

Best Regards… bla bla bla

Great, thanks. But oh wait, i didn’t request a refund 🙄 You see this is what you call ‘digging a hole for yourself’. We all know somebody most likely made a pricing error, so why try to cover it up and confuse issues further???

Why not just come out and say ‘we messed up, very sorry, but as per gray area no 367.443232478 on our terms and conditions, we’re entitled to refund people…. however, as a gesture of goodwill, here’s a €5 off voucher when you spend €10,000+’

Surely it makes more sense to issue that sort of response…. a polite but firm response that only an idiot will take further action with. Pixmania don’t have a great reputation for customer service and yet again they’re not doing themselves any favours here.

Quite often, a ‘smart’ company can turn this sort of negative publicity in to positive publicity. Vouchers, some sort of alternative deal, a freebie…. anything. But when a company tries to play dumb and just refunds customers without notice when THEY got the order / prices ‘wrong’, that can’t possibly end well for anyone…

Aer Lingus did it a while back too when they messed up business class prices… Ryanair caused massive controversy when they took a swipe at a blogger for outing a flaw in their pricing system. It happens. It will happen again. Some will go undetected, most however will be detected.

Anyway, there have been reports that one or two orders slipped through the system. Most people however got the same response i did. Some rang up to complain, some fired off emails to all sorts of consumer rights groups… check out this thread on boards.ie to watch how events unfolded.