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Comment by acid__ | Hacker News Reader

I got in on this! I got a Sony A7R II and a 24-70 2.8 II I'd always wanted but could never justify the purchase of. ($~3k value for $200)

A few observations:

- Despite the extraordinary deal we got, my friends (who also made a purchase) and I all have our joy offset by a feeling of regret that we didn't order more. Greed!

- Despite the fact that I couldn't justify the purchase before I owned them, I now definitely don't want to sell the gear. A clear cut case of the Endowment Effect in action [0]

- A lot of people saying the orders are going to be cancelled -- seeing as I currently have both body and lens in possession, I find that unlikely.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect

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In the Netherlands this also happened some times on webshops.

And everytime a judge ruled people had to bring the goods back or should pay the full amount.

The reason is that it is very clear for the buyer it is a mistake. And almost all webshops have a legal notice about wrong or false prices.

> And everytime a judge ruled people had to bring the goods back or should pay the full amount.

This is slightly different from what I remember, so can you link me an example?

Last time I checked, the webshop must fulfill the order, unless the price is obviously wrong, and the webshop cannot force a return for something the customer has already recieved and paid for.

Here an example (in Dutch): http://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:G...

Ah, I see. So, in short, you can be forced to return an order, but that is only because the order was not made with a "legal" price [0], so no legal transaction has taken place, and all that happened was you sending the webshop money without cause, and they mistakenly sending you a product, which both must be returned upon request by the other party.

[0] a "legal" price is a price which the customer would expect for such a product. But in a shop advertising "up to 60% off", a 50% off TV would still be legal price, even if it is a price error.

Yes. It is a little more complicated than I posted earlier, but the point is that not all parties agreed on the arrangement so there was no arrangement.

I don't see anything here where it says people had to bring back TVs. Seems like orders were unilaterally cancelled by the seller.

I think that if Amazon does ship these (and it seems some already did) it's actually pretty neat advertisement for them. Any publicity is good publicity, right?

I wonder how much an advertisement campaign with this amount of buzz usually costs.

Absolutely. It is a tiny fraction with significant publicity effect. It's even here on HN discussion.

Yes but it has more costs involved than just this.

For example the statistics of the brands Sony and Canon are now wrong and the budget of advertising is still as it was yesterday. So the bookkeepers have a lot of exta work to get this straight.

They won't even notice that. Data collection at this scale is anyway not 100% accurate. Especially for marketing purposes.

On the flip side if their data collection is that good they can see who was on the fence to purchase high-end gear for photo shooting, but bought the deal. That can lead to opening new demographics or targeting them with features people want from top models. Only having full information, you could argue which option is better.

I definitely hope that they don't have data at this level.

If I remember correctly, in these cases (bunk beds and televisions) the orders were never fulfilled. The court ruled that a sales contract is not binding if the buyer can reasonably suspect that the price shown is so absurdly low that an error on the side of the seller is apparent.

That is, you can try to order the item, but the seller has no legal obligation of fulfilling it if they can proof beyond reasonable doubt that a mistake was made, and can return the money instead.

This is because (at least in many shops in the EU) ordering does imply a sale, no contract has been made, it is only a notion of intent (which if you read the T&C in the order confirmation you'll find pretty often). The contract is only made when the company ships it, thus agreeing to the sale.

Actually the contract is in place when the order is confirmed. At least from EU webshops it's common to receive two mails, one for order received, another for order confirmed (potentially hours or even days later).

This actually hit the spotlight recently in Spain as Dell advertised 1000-1800€ laptops for 29-35€ on their site[0]. Many people bought, received the first AND the second email around 5h later.

If it wasn't for that second email, they could cancel the order no questions asked, but actually someone on their side said "yep, this order looks fine" and clicked confirm. Consumer associations are hitting Dell with all their force.

[0] In Spanish: https://www.eldiario.es/tecnologia/portatiles-Dell-clientes-...

My god Dell's webshop is a steaming pile of fun. I've only had to deal with being unable to order months on end - this sounds much more friendly!

Not friendly, they canceled the orders, breaching their own contract and the law doing so. They went past the "no backsies" point in the transaction and they actually backed out.

> The court ruled that a sales contract is not binding if the buyer can reasonably suspect that the price shown is so absurdly low that an error on the side of the seller is apparent.

How can you prove something like that in court in this camera case?

For example, let's say you were just getting into photography and were window shopping by browsing around Amazon's site.

You run into a camera that has a 4.7 average rating with 3,000+ reviews and the example pictures that people were posting look great to you. You have no idea about camera specs but you see it for $149, so you buy it. That doesn't seem too unrealistic, especially not when phones cost $1,000. You could totally think "oh, well $150 for just a camera sounds about right".

Because you can infer that the "-99%" near the price is weird.

The a6000 is normally $550 and was marked down to $95. That's not a big enough discount to infer it was a price mistake. Especially not when Amazon advertises this as one of the biggest discount days of the year.

And it's quite possible that a Dutch court would rule different in that particular case.

>How can you prove something like that in court in this camera case?

Go look at the screenshots in the article it shows the prime savings at checkout:

>Prime Savings -$1,204.52

That is a pretty clear indication that "wow, this is astronomically discounted" which should reasonably clue any adult with their full mental faculties in to "something strange is going on here".

Am I missing something here? A $1200 markdown isn't impossibly large.

It's a 1200$ markdown on a 1300$ item.

I have Steam sales offering me games with 90% off, Groupon offering me 88% off a gym membership, and a local perpetually-going-out-of-business menswear shop offering me 90% off everything. Amazon themselves advertise used books priced from £0.01!

Admittedly, many camera enthusiasts probably knew the market rate for this sort of equipment - but the fact something has a 90% discount doesn't automatically prove it's mispriced.

Software which is infinitely reproducible for (effectively) free once it is made, is a lot different than high end lenses and very complicated cameras with costly electronics and worked optical glass.

With Amazon having big ads saying "massive discounts on prime day", I as a buyer might well consider $3000 down to $100 is in fact a massive discount rather than a mistake.

Grats on the lucky score!

> A lot of people saying the orders are going to be cancelled -- seeing as I currently have both body and lens in possession, I find that unlikely.

Gotta agree that it's unlikely for these orders to be cancelled. Seems like Amazon.com's got a lot of cash (without checking, but I assume?), so they can probably afford it. Instead, the smart move would seem to be to play this up hard -- perhaps, for example, pushing a few stories in advance of the next Prime Day about this mistake, driving more sales as folks hope to enjoy a similar lucky break.

I mean, overall, seems like a nice feel-good story.

Excellent point - what better way of advertising than to let some stories leak to mass tech media that you may hit a lottery, and if you do, Amazon won't take it away?

There were stories of other mispriced deals that folks got where the order was cancelled. So I imagine it’s simply a matter of what Amazon caught in time vs not.

A camera I ordered just shipped, so I think they are just eating the cost.

Only if its in your hand. They have ways.

To redirect a UPS shipment after a card has already been charged? Not even in pending - the charge has cleared at this point?

Yes, technically the person or company who is shipping with UPS (or FedEx for that matter) can redirect shipments. Sometimes it's expensive, sometimes not so much. Regular folks receiving do not have as much control.

I've never done it personally but when I worked at Polk Audio way back in the day they had a special application that interfaced with UPS and they could reroute things already in route. I don't know what the limits are, etc, but seems doable.

Having said that I doubt they'll do it once it's out the door.

Your card being charged doesn't really matter. If they wanted to they could totally redirect the package and reverse the charge. Amazon does tons of refunds every day like that, they don't hurt the company's standing with the payment processing companies like chargebacks do.

>- A lot of people saying the orders are going to be cancelled -- seeing as I currently have both body and lens in possession, I find that unlikely.

Just as a counterview; I've ordered other types of equipment on prime day that had pricing errors and I was later informed Amazon would not fullfill the order and got a 20$ gift code.

I've had the same situation and reward, but just on a normal non prime day.

I've had mispriced orders cancelled with no gift voucher in return. Just a "mistakes happen" email.

No. Amazon is not going to send you a legal notice to return this. Amazon wants to be the customer centric company and this act is to prove that they own the mistake and the customer is the king.

Source: Amazon employee.

This attitude is exactly why I feel safe buying from amazon and will continue to do so. If they were sending lawyers over a few bucks like Nintendo regularly does, they would have landed on my blacklist, just like Nintendo did. This attitude is imho one of the most important assets of amazon and they'd be stupid to throw it away over peanuts.

Damn! I got the A6000 for $100, but I wish I got the A7R instead :( I guess that falls under observation 1

Don't be disappointed! The A6000 is a fantastic camera, even for the $500 I purchased it for two years ago.

I just bought one two weeks ago.... I could've gotten it so much cheaper, or gotten a better camera haha

Hey, if you're feeling bad about it, I'll be happy to get it from you at $200

You are one hell of a lucky guy !!

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