Compaq Australia faces lawsuit over one cent laptops

ZDNet Australia has received complaints that Compaq is refusing to honour the promotion, which the company has blamed on a Web site system glitch.

Manpal Jagpal, Compaq Australia's Presario product manager, said an -intermittent" system anomaly led to incorrect pricing details being displayed on its Web site, but said the mistake was quickly spotted and corrected.

-On Thursday night and Friday morning we had intermittent pricing being pulled through on our system's Web borders. The customers, when they looked at the site, would have seen the correct price, but when they actually went to the final details they would have seen them pulled through as one cent," he said.

-It's definitely a system glitch and it's purely because it was pulling through the pricing incorrectly. It didn't actually do that all the time - it was very, very intermittent. We picked it up first thing Friday morning."

The pricing boo-boo affected two Presario models, the 711 and 1722 which usually sell for AU$2799 and $3999 respectively, according to Jagpal, who added that -less than 200" customers had attempted to buy the unusually inexpensive laptops.

One customer who spoke to ZDNet Australia, refused to accept Compaq's excuse and refuted the vendor's claim that -less than 200" sales had been affected by the glitch.

Matt Cust, managing director of Victorian Web development company AKN Media, said he was one of the first to spot the incredible offer and immediately posted a notification on a popular Internet news group. This posting, he said, led to a flood of people seeking to take advantage of the offer.

-The Web site printed out a receipt for the transaction. We've been in touch with [lawyers] Slater and Gordon this morning. Five hundred people bought those laptops. I was the first person to discover the offer. I posted it in [a chat room] and I've got a list of everyone who bought one. You can see by the order number on the product. I was the first person to get one and I was person number [in the chat room] number 738 and the last person was number 1102 or something like that," Cust said.

-There was over 500 laptops bought - people were ordering ten at a time. At one cent a go, that's ten cents, so why wouldn't you?"

While it regrets the incident, Jagpal said the company was not duty-bound to honour any of the one cent deals because it didn't process any payments.

-We sent e-mails saying 'thank you for your interest and we've received your inquiry'. But we only send receipts once the money has been transacted. In this case, none of the money has been transacted and none of the credit cards or any other payment details were taken through."

Cust has also questioned Compaq's legal obligations in relation to the mistaken offer, and said the company's own sales policy clearly indicates the customers' entitlements to the one cent deal - regardless of whether or not it was intentionally offered.

-We've printed out the receipt and looked at the terms and conditions on [Compaq's] Web site which say that all sales are final and binding as soon as you push the 'sale' button," he said.

-We saved all the copies of everything - screen shots everything - because we knew that [Compaq] was going to claim it was a mistake. We saved everything. When we first saw it we thought it was some sort of promotion because it was merger day."

Cust said the pricing blunder is symptomatic of larger backend problems within the Compaq Web site, and is confident that customers will win legal proceedings forcing the vendor to honour the promotion.

-[The pricing glitch] was actually a result of buggy ASP code. Their whole site is as buggy as shit. There's holes all over it," he claimed. -[Lawyers Slater and Gordon] are looking at the documentation and they're probably going to take it on because they reckon we can win."

-We're trying to pressure Compaq into honouring at least some of it - maybe one laptop each person. At the end of the day, [Compaq] wrote the code, it was their code that was buggy and there's an obvious hole in it. The crazy thing is if you go into the Compaq Web store right now and enter your purchase code, it's still coming up as a proper receipt and if you want to get in and see the last 20 orders with the people's details, you can do it. The whole thing is so buggy it's unbelievable."

Compaq Australia failed to respond to further requests for comment by press time.