How To Avoid Ecommerce Pricing Glitches

Every so often, the internet lights up with a piece of news that spreads faster than a rumor at a small town barbeque. Somebody scored an absolutely unbelievable deal while shopping online – savings so outrageous they just had to humblebrag on social media. Someone else sees the post and decides to check it out, and the rest is history. In the blink of an eye, thousands of users descend on the website for a chance to score a deal that’s too good to be true. Unfortunately for the store, it’s not true at all. It’s an ecommerce price glitch, and it’s costing them dearly.

Ecommerce pricing glitches, data errors, and coupon loopholes happen more than you think. Pricing errors can include malfunctions such as bugs in the website coding, data errors or typos that lead to mismarked items, and irregular discounts and coupon loopholes. It is an ongoing challenge for small and large companies alike to maintain the integrity of pricing data and discount processes.

There have been several high-profile pricing glitches and shopping cart errors on major retail websites in recent months.

When price mistakes happen in-store, there’s a cashier who might notice and refuse the sale, saving the company from a loss. But online, there’s no cashier to catch the error and stop the sale from going through.

Smaller stores with lower margins and lower amounts of cash savings can get hurt by just a few accidental discounts. It’s important to be very careful and diligent when you are small.

Bigger stores can handle a few transactions here and there with accidental discounts. However, the bigger reputations that these larger stores have can be their downfall. The word of the pricing error can spread like wildfire and the consequences can get severe very quickly. Once a user discovers an error, it usually doesn’t take long for news of the glitch to get out.

There are even entire websites, social media communities, and Reddit threads devoted to helping shoppers exploit online pricing and shopping cart loopholes.

For example, one bargain hunter in the UK shared how he was able to get a brand new £200 Xbox for just £45, a pair of £229 Bose headphones for  a mere £72, and £1500 worth of clothing for only £36.

The promise of scoring some crazy low-price deals is exciting for customers, but bad for the business – especially if you don’t have an expert team (us!) ready to help you mitigate these pricing glitches from happening in the first place, and on-call to help fix them as soon as they happen.

In the social media age, word of a good deal spreads incredibly fast. Thousands of orders can be placed within just minutes, sending merchants spiraling into damage-control mode.

One Chinese business called Genki Forest accidentally lost millions of dollars worth of product after an employee made a typo. 300,000 retail and bulk orders were placed in about a half-hour, resulting in a big loss and PR crisis for the store.

As vigilant as you are as a seller, pricing glitches can still happen. Small companies to large retailers and marketplaces have had challenges with decimal point glitches, dropped digits, the penny glitch, coupon stacking, and other issues.

1. Have a reliable and routine backup solution like Rewind in place.
2. Notify your expert team (us!) to immediately fix the mistake.
3. Notify the platform like Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.
4. Take responsibility for the mistake.
5. File a claim with your business insurance.
6. Work with buyers to cancel orders.
7. Issue credits to help repair customer loyalty.
8. Refund customers or reimburse partners to cover any losses when necessary.

When companies get into a frenzied situation like the Genki Forest situation mentioned above, they have difficult choices to make. Do they cancel the sales and risk souring their brand’s relationship with potentially thousands of customers who think they’ve scored an amazing deal? Or do they honor the sales and take a major financial hit? Whichever path they choose, they lose. If only they had a time machine!

Different states, and countries have their own laws regarding what does and do not determine the contract of sale. In some situations, the transaction itself may or may not be considered a contract which may also be determined by what is in the store’s Terms of Use or Terms and Conditions agreements. You should contact your lawyer to determine your strategy for your agreements and how to handle these situations when they arise.

For example, the Terms of Use on Walmart.com says, “Walmart reserves the right to cancel any orders containing pricing or availability errors, with no further obligations to you, even after your receipt of an order confirmation or shipping notice from Walmart.”

Although many stores choose to cancel orders after they catch the pricing glitch, it may be in your best interest to honor the sale regardless to protect the integrity of your promises – as long as your business can handle the loss. Sometimes, honoring one order with a pricing glitch can result in a flurry of activity from customers who see it posted on social media. Most importantly, you will maintain good relationships with your customers.

Ecommerce price glitches are best handled by preventing them before they even occur, and that starts by ensuring your ecommerce platform is rock-solid. In addition, you need the right pricing and payment management solutions and a consistent process that leaves no room for error. Make sure pricing data is translating properly across channels and marketplaces. And of course keep your ecommerce store secure from hackers.

• Specifically, check for certain changes
• Alarms around the volume of changes
• Proactively watch for mistakes that are happening with other companies
• Look for conflicting old software that hasn’t been revoked or uninstalled that could send bad data.
• Test the full product lifecycle in simulation or using real product data. Note that if you are on a marketplace like Amazon, you don’t have the opportunity to use a sandbox.

Not every problem in ecommerce can be resolved easily with a simple app, but this one can! Solutions like Rewind Backups make it easy for merchants to back up, copy, and restore your SaaS and cloud data. Rewind’s data backup and recovery software can backup all your critical business data, including ecommerce, accounting, productivity, and development. As developers, we love Rewind because it lets us “move fast and break stuff” without doing any damage, which helps us sprint our clients solutions forward faster. As marketers, we love Rewind because it gives us the safety net to take bold steps when they stand to make the biggest impact, like during the holidays and sales events. No more “hands off” policies hindering our ability to test, tweak, and optimize the customer experience when it really counts. It won’t prevent problems from happening, but it will give you the safety net to roll back and carry on quickly to minimize business impact.

Check out Blayzer’s Ecommerce Technology Partners page for a list of tested and proven solutions we trust to keep our clients out of this kind of trouble and much more.