I must say, this has been an interesting event to follow thus far. Recently, as many of you know, thebay.com was running a promotion where by entering various promotional codes you could get a discount on the order. It appeared that the coupons were stackable and as a result you could get 45%+ savings on almost everything. Now many knew that there was chances the order wouldn’t actually go through as this seems like a too good to be true scenario.
But what seemed to have gotten people all riled up is the company’s way of handling this. First the company issued out this generic e-mail as you can see here:
So as you can see, they essentially didn’t really take any fault in the matter and labelled it as a user error. So that seemed to have ruffled a few feathers. It then got more interesting as their method of cancelling orders for many people apparently was that they sent messages that the items were simply “out of stock.” Many people allege that this is a potential way to bypass any kind of laws to get the company to honor any of the orders. People were actually testing this out of stock theory such as making new orders and the messages on their Facebook page sure demonstrated how that simply wasn’t the case:
I was thinking how this probably wouldn’t have been so overblown if the business simply admitted that there is a fault in the system. Even as a bargain shopper myself I understand if the company has malfunctions like these. A little business transparency goes a long way huh? Especially in this day and age where it’s so easy to look up various information. Interested to see how this all pans out in the end. What do others think? Are bargain hunters going overboard here or does The Hudson Bay Company have a very poor way of managing its online operations?