Walmart Website Error Allowed Customers to Buy $600 Electronics for $8.85

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Causing an online frenzy among shoppers, an apparent glitch on Walmart's website early this morning led to $8.85 listings for items, including computer monitors and projectors normally worth hundreds of dollars.

The country's largest retailer was selling a 24-inch high definition Viewsonic computer monitor, an InFocus IN2124 Projector digital projectors and other products, many for $8.85. The projector is listed for $578.89 on Walmart.com and $579.99 on Newegg.com.

As customers shared about the deals on social media sites like Instagram, wondering if the site was hacked, products sold out online in just hours.

Walmart says that a technical error on its website erroneously led to super low prices on Nov. 6, 2013.

A spokesman for Walmart said the company is still scanning the millions of items on its site to see if there are still any technical errors causing price discrepancies.
Walmart assured the media that the site was not hacked.

"We experienced a technical error that caused some items to show incorrect pricing," Walmart said in a statement. "We are working quickly to correct the error and during this time, there may be intermittent site availability. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers."

Ravi Jariwala, a spokesman for Walmart, said: "I want to make very clear this is not a hack. This is an internal technical error."

When asked if the company will honor items sold to customers at the mistakenly low prices, Jariwala said the company is "still working through those details."

Just two weeks ago, Walmart stores in Louisiana experienced another frenzied shopping day, but that time with live customers. An error in the food stamps EBT system caused account limits to temporarily disappear, leading customers to load up shopping carts with hundreds of dollars worth of items.


http://abcnews.go.com/Business/walmart-super-low-prices-website-glitch/story?id=20804317

Why do I miss all the good stuff, guys? ;_; People are already confirming that they did an in-store delivery and walked away with the items, as well as the status of their items online turning to "shipped."
 
wtf a serious moofle post
wish i had been there when that happened
 
So, how much money did they lose for this? :P
 
This actually isn't all that uncommon. I remember GAME UK were selling XB360s for free because of a technical error about a year back. The companies almost never uphold the sales from the errors and just repay the money. It's not that big of a deal.

I mean, if they uphold the sales then yes, it is a big deal but I'm 99% sure they won't.

"I want to make very clear this is not a hack. This is an internal technical error."
This made me giggle. "This is not a hack. I repeat, it is not a hack!"

Pretty sure one of the developers just made a booboo and it got deployed to production. Happens all the time. I do wonder how such big issues get deployed though, like, don't they review the change logs and test on staging, or something?
 
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