One cent laptop offer a mistake: Compaq Aust - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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One cent laptop offer a mistake: Compaq Aust

By Cass Warneminde, ZDNet Australia
May 06, 2002
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/One-cent-laptop-offer-a-mistake-Compaq-Aust/0,139023166,120265041,00.htm

In a move that has outraged users, Compaq Australia will not honour a one cent laptop deal which it said was mistakenly advertised on its Web site as a result of a system glitch.

ZDNet Australia has received complaints that Compaq has reneged on an alleged promotion on its site, in which two of its Presario model laptop computers were offered for sale for just one cent.

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.

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."

Jagpal said the Web site error was discovered as part of its regular online checks and extra precautions are being taken to ensure the mistake is not repeated.