The thing is, it's not difficult to implement, it's just a matter if doing it.
Will it cost money for the online retailer to do it? Yes. Would it potentially save them money if implemented? Likely yes. The online retailers are already reducing overheads and maximizing profits by 1) not usually have a physical location with a store front, 2) having essentially no sales staff, and 3) many times drop-shipping an item straight from a manufacturer to the customer's door, meaning that they didn't even have to maintain an inventory, and did not incur the item cost until it was purchased. Detecting sales spikes is simply a matter of setting threshholds, recording item and time of each sale, and then a batch process running that continually analyzes the data and flips a switch if a probable problem is detected. As you know the NYSE has software that operates on this principle, and guess what? AFAIK, up to the point it kicks in, the trades are valid and legal. I disagree with the notion that there is any inherent difference between putting a physical price tag on an item or display shelf, and entering that same information into a computer screen, except that the computer screen likely shows far more information (item cost, description, units of sale like single or pair) to the person, and should enable one to catch pricing issues more easily than when a low paid, unknowledgable clerk hangs a price tag. As far as where to cut it off in the case of volume sales, that's up to the vendor. One way to handle it, other than the monitoring software, is to have sales of certain items only be finalized after further review and approval, which could take no more than several minutes. It seems what you would do is put the majority of the responsiblity on the customer, and abrogate the responsibility of the retailer, which if done, will simply lead to sloppy(ier) business practices. Tom C. On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Mark Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: > Tom C wrote: > >>Ugh! :-) >> >>I agree that the retailer should not suffer *huge* losses because an >>item was mismarked, especially in the electronic online ordering >>scenario where word gets around and they are flooded with orders. On >>the other hand, being aware of this possibility, any large online >>retailer who does not have software in place to monitor transactions >>and send out an alert when there's a spike in orders of any given item >>in a given time period, and automatically suspend sales of that item >>is foolish. > > Good idea, but I'm not aware of any software that does so. And, by > definition, it could only react *after* a spike existed. It would be > tricky to implement, too, because most of the time a spike in sales is > something you *want* to see. You'd need algorithms to differentiate > between "good" sales spikes and "bad" ones. (And staff to deal with > pissed off customers when the algorithm - eventually - made a > mistake.) > >>Same goes for selling items at or below cost unless they >>are specifically flagged to allow it. > > I'd guess that's exactly what happened in the case that started all > this. The company running the web site has the *price* of the items > for sale but it's unlikely that any large retailer would allow their > *cost* information out of house. So the discrepancy won't be detected > until the web host forwards the order information to the retailer. > >>On an individual transaction basis, Bill's mis-priced milk scenario >>stands and the online store has exactly the same responsibilities to >>the customer as a brick and mortar store. The money is the same, why >>is everything else not the same? > > The cashier in Bill's mis-priced milk scenario can see if there are > 1000 other customers in line with mis-priced milk. The online retailer > can't (until it's too late). If the online store is required to sell > just one mis-priced item because the loss isn't "huge", what do they > tell the second person in line? For that matter, how does the second > person know they're not being lied to and they really *are* the first > person in line? (I think that's what Cambridge Camera Exchange would > do!) > > The answer to pretty much all of the above is that a lot of best > practices for the real world simply don't scale to the virtual one. > Comparison of one to the other is fundamentally flawed. > > I looked for online retailers who promised to honor the prices > advertised on their site even in the event of a mistake. I couldn't > find any. (They're probably out there if you look hard enough, but > I'll bet they're small, newbie operations that haven't been bitten > yet. Or sellers of v...@gra, pr0n, etc. who have no intention of > honoring the promise.) -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
