Overstock Pricing Error

Posted in Computers & Technology, Deals & Savings, Games, Humour by Elliott Back on September 20th, 2006.

I was looking at PSP games for the PSP I never play on Overstock out of pure curiosity and I came across the following HOT DEAL:

That’s right–Overstock wants to sell me a game at a 28% markup over list price. Wow. The same game is going for $29.99 on Amazon: Astonishia Story. OK, so it’s a pricing error of some sort or another–no big deal right?

That’s not true. From a technology perspective, if you see any of these kinds of basic errors, where even a single product can sell for more than list, you know that Overstock’s IT infrastructure has serious data integrity problems. They’re either not checking their system against itself for inconsistencies, not checking external data against internal data, or some combination of the above. Either way, it’s a big problem that directly affects the customer experience.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 1:30 am and is tagged with integrity problems, technology perspective, psp games, data integrity, overstock, amazon, hot deal, customer experience, same game, inconsistencies, markup, curiosity, psp, astonishia story, infrastructure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

Viewing 2 Comments

Will 2 years ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Overstock's IT is basically hopeless. I ordered 3 items before Christmas that netted me two separate tracking numbers, one that "shipped" and one that never got past electronic notification. I used their live chat thing like 5 times before they'd resend the product. Worst part is that each time, they were completely assured yet completely oblivious of the order's status. They finally agreed to cancel the order and reship it after almost 2 months. I haven't ordered anything since.

reply edit reblog flag

http://willmonwah.blogspot.com

kwa 2 years ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

I'm afraid there are few companies that check their data for inconsistencies. Have you read the Google report on third parties click audit reports?

How Fictitious Clicks Occur in Third-Party Click Fraud Audit Reports
http://www.google.com/adwords/ReportonThird-Par...

where you can read:

"Events identified as fraudulent in these reports, which actually match real clicks in our logs, often converted at nearly the same rate (and in some cases better) compared to other clicks. For example, in one case where 800 paid clicks were marked as "fraudulent", the rate of conversion for these clicks was 5.1%, which compared favorably with the 5.8% overall conversion rate the advertiser achieved on approximately 24000 paid clicks."

Can you imagine a click fraud spammer BUYING anything on a promoted web site? It appears nobody cares...

reply edit reblog flag

http://unearaigneeauplafond.be