Dell computer discount coupon

GLITCHES: Price goofs are a fact of e-commerce. Deal with it.

It was a deal too good to be true -- literally. When Kmart's BlueLight.com listed the Nomad Jukebox MP3 player on its site one day in April, a keying mistake set the price at a mere $26.89 instead of $299. Thanks to special bulletin boards for bargain hunters, news of the discount spread across the Web, and soon BlueLight was flooded with thousands of orders. Many people ordered more than one.

BlueLight corrected the glitch quickly enough, but the damage was already done. The retailer now had the unenviable task of telling buyers that it could not honor the accidental discount of nearly 90 percent. Naturally, that didn't go over well with BlueLight's customers, who took to online message boards to lambaste the site. It was, in short, a public relations fiasco.

Pricing goofs like this happen every day on the Web. Usually they're minor errors that go unnoticed, but occasionally it's a big merchant and a big item -- like a laptop or a plane ticket. Earlier this year, for instance, lucky shoppers booked $27 flights from the U.S. to Paris on United Airlines' Web site and free nightly stays at the Hilton's Mexico City Airport Hotel.

Such pricing glitches are nothing new. Amazon.com has grappled with the issue for several years. But as e-commerce expands, so do the goofs. Thanks to the speed of online communications -- and of Web sites like FatWallet.com, which alerts shoppers to online deals -- few goofs go unnoticed.

The simple fact is that no matter how fancy the software, pricing glitches happen. Blame computer bugs, faulty coupons and simple typing errors.

Though most online retailers view glitches as an unavoidable hazard of the job, they typically don't honor the resulting lower prices. Some will put forward some kind of a consolation prize, like offering the mistakenly listed product for its wholesale price, or giving customers a coupon, as BlueLight did in the case of the MP3 player.

"There's no such thing as perfection in life," says Outpost CEO Darryl Peck. "We carry a couple hundred thousand SKUs. Every now and then someone's gonna hit the wrong key on the keyboard." Peck says human error is the sole cause of the few pricing glitches suffered by his company's site. An employee need only mistype a decimal point when entering a price, he explains, and a camera could list for 99 cents instead of $99. Such glitches, Peck maintains, are statistically insignificant; he estimates Outpost's losses at a few thousand dollars over six years.

To minimize the damage of data-entry mistakes, arts-and-crafts retailer Eziba.com set up a system of checks and balances. When a new product gets posted to Eziba's site, its price is rechecked by everyone who "touches" the listing, from the inventory planner to the copywriter. This system, says Eziba CEO Bill Miller, has limited pricing glitches to a handful of cases.

Hitting the wrong number on a keyboard, however, is just one way to create chaos. Complex software systems can cause much more insidious mistakes. As sites become more elaborate, with dozens of Web servers connecting to application servers, which in turn connect to back-end databases and mainframes, the potential for trouble increases exponentially. A single point of failure anywhere along the chain can result in a pricing goof. And software-based glitches are much harder to detect than those caused by human error.

"If someone missed a decimal point, it could get discovered," says Randi Barshack, VP of marketing and business development for TeaLeaf Technology, whose products help find and fix pricing problems. "You look it up in the database table and you fix it. But if a price is a dynamic calculation, you can't go anywhere to find it. It doesn't exist anywhere."

The problem could be a bug buried in code that manifests itself only under certain circumstances. For example, when an e-commerce server gets over-loaded, it usually crashes, explains Jim Dugger, co-founder of Tonic Software. In rare cases, though, the system doesn't crash. Instead, it mistakenly applies one customer's data to several others. When this happened at a b-to-b site Tonic now works with, one corporate customer received the special rates designated for another customer.

Another common cause of pricing bugs: the electronic coupons many retailers now distribute to customers. At sites like Fat Wallet, you'll find forums where customers can trade coupons they don't want for ones they do. If a merchant doesn't assign a unique numerical code to each individual coupon, the code can be punched into a site repeatedly, by any number of people -- granting a discount bonanza and wreaking havoc with the e-commerce software in the process.

Since few e-retailers have the resources to sniff out and fix such esoteric problems before they happen, many focus instead on trying to detect the inevitable errors quickly, before they cause too much harm. One common tactic is to set up special monitoring systems that fire off alerts whenever unusual shopping activity occurs. For example, every order that's placed on Dell's Web site is automatically screened ON the back end to make sure it fits within certain price ranges. While Dell suffers the occasional pricing glitch, says Tom Vogl, director of consumer e-business, the system allows him to detect problems and respond quickly.

Pricing errors can sometimes hurt the bottom line, but they're almost always bad for customer relations. Mistakes tell shoppers that a company's system has flaws. That can make shoppers think twice about entrusting that business with their credit card number.

"It's like when your doctor misspells something," says TeaLeaf's Barshack. "You start to think, 'Is this the person I want to operate on me?'" If not, Web shoppers may decide to seek a second opinion.