Dell Taiwan dishonors online sales with its own price tag mistakes
Jul 15, 2009 12:08I was flabbergasted when I read about the Dell Taiwan online store's big pricing boo boo in today's Straits Times Digital Life. Dell mispriced its Latitude E4300 and 19-inch LCD monitors so low on its online store that more than 100,000 orders were placed last week. After realizing the pricing mistake and wonder why sales was "so good", it decided to take down its site in Taiwan after realizing the oversight.
I am unhappy with Dell dishonoring the sales. Obviously, the massive order would cause Dell to lose a substantial amount of revenue. But by having mistakenly priced its products at such a low price and then dishonoring the sale, it gives a bad taste in the mouth to the 100,000 customers.
Since the company has dishonored the sales, Dell should now try to salvage its reputation and win back brand loyalty by providing an explanation of what caused the pricing mistakes and counter offering with an equally attractive deal to those who had earlier placed the orders.
Similar to this but which may be unknown to many people, several years ago, SingTel's online mall made the same mistake by pricing some of the mobile phones at a massively reduced price, without plan, either. Although I think the orders placed weren't as numerous as Dell's because SingTel managed to discover the mistake early and reverted to the correct price, the teclo still honored the sales and delivered the mobile phones to the customers with no strings attached.
No information has been given on when the Dell Taiwan site is expected to be back online again.
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Dell's excuse was that someone hacked into their website and changed all the prices? In any case, they should at least issue some sort of compensation to those customers affected. Discount coupons, free accessories, or even food stamps might just do it ;-). If this fiasco happened in the U.S., they'd probably be up to their asses with lawsuits. Only in Asia could they get away with something like this. Shame on Dell!
Jul 15, 2009 13:30
Dell TW actually offered discount coupons, but I'm not sure if it's to all or some.
Jul 15, 2009 13:32
Great! Let's hope everyone affected gets a fair discount. May they also realize that if something is too cheap to be true, it probably isn't!
Jul 15, 2009 13:46
your colleague, Spencer, wrote about this 2 weeks ago
Jul 16, 2009 07:57
About Suzanna Low
Suzanna Low has more than a decade of hands-on in interactive and graphics design, e-commerce and online marketing. In fact, true to the Singapore culture, she's a diehard shopaholic and fancies herself a pioneering e-retailer who learned the painful way how to set up store back when ecommerce emerged on the Internet landscape. Low also claims to speak feline language and sometimes seeks approval for her blog topics with her two house cats.
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