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Comment by huangc10 | Hacker News Reader

They will cancel majority of the purchases. However, if you were smart, you'd have chosen 1 day shipping and have received the item.

Me? I was not smart and did not select 1 day shipping so it looks like my order will most likely be canceled once Amazon deals with this...

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Nah, the blowback they'd get from not honoring the purchasing would be terrible. More generally, Amazon are one of the few companies who understand that short term losses can lead to long-term goodwill and profit.

So anyway, my prediction is that they will do nothing about your purchase.

Eh, no one is going to stop using Amazon if Amazon didn't honor 2k camera for $94.

You're right. A few years ago Air Canada accidentally priced an $8000 flight pass for $99 or some low number. I bought two, as did hundreds of other people. Air Canada canceled them all and yet I still look up Air Canada prices every time I need to fly.

Eh, no one is going to stop using Amazon if Amazon didn't honor 2k camera for $94.

Probably, but people might be disinclined to pay attention to prime day next year. It's definitely lost a lot of its luster now that Amazon mostly hawks their own cheap crap that nobody's that interested in.

Me? I could see this easily being an accident that someone decided to let ride. Maybe they cancel a few orders, but I doubt they'd cancel most or all of them.

Well most of the people found these deals are the ones who will understand it.

They'll almost certainly cancel it. Pricing errors like this happen all the time on Amazon, there are whole websites/subreddits dedicated to finding them. Usually they just cancel it the next day and maybe give you a $10 gift card.

Sometimes you get lucky and get the item, but the media's advertisement of this will probably exponentially increase the chance of getting your order canceled, unless Amazon has some crazy PR strategy.

Seems some are beginning to receive their gear.

Is that still happening? Do you have recent links of people getting gift card/credit regularly? Amazon seems to have stopped doing that largely for some time now.

80 of those orders are over a million dollars.

They're probably cancelling it. And very few people will give them "blowback" for not giving stuff away for free when the people "buying" it must have known.

Hold out hope. It gives excellent publicity to Prime day and their brand if they don't cancel them - why ruin that with potentially bad publicity, etc. over what probably amounts to a few hundred thousand dollars, which they can easily afford to cover.

Technically Amazon Canada but back in the day they mispriced Lisp in Small Pieces for really cheap and then cancelled almost every order.

I only bought a copy that actually arrived of that book last year to make up for it. Need to finish plowing through it at some point, the part I read is so good.

Because they have done it quite a few times in the past.

Amazon has made this mistake in past too and it seems they are unable to solve it.

I think Amazon might start asking manufacturers to add remote bricking ability, so that when mistakes like this happens, Amazon remotely bricks the device before even customer gets to open it and then Amazon sends them an email, "it seems the device we sent you at unbelievably low price was broken before even reaching your door, if you return it you would receive a $20 gift card" )

Intentionally bricking an already sold item so the customer has to return it? There is no way Amazon will implement something even close to that. It’s also probably illegal.

Sale itself was a result of an error tho.

That’s a ridiculous solution. Many of those products can’t go online by themselves, that $13,000 lens can’t and most the cameras talk to a phone only, not the internet, and that’s even if people use that feature. I don’t why Sony, Canon or others would even consider this when no other retailer has this issue.

I’m not sure the bad publicity is worth it. People will who read the press about it, will doubt the real deals are real and not order them (e.g. 50% off, which is big saving, but still happens). Amazon is big company with a lot of good engineers, seems like they should be able to solve this problem.

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