Dear Amazon Customer

Recently, I played through the demo of El Shaddai: Ascension of Metatron, and I said outright that I wasn’t impressed. After senselessly ripping the demo to shreds, I discovered the game itself on sale for a ludicrously cheap price from the Amazon website. You’ve probably heard of Amazon; they have a rainforest and everything.

The price was too good to be true. I know that’s a saying we’re used to hearing every now and then, but this price really was too good to be true. Being naive, I figured maybe it was just excess stock they wanted to get rid of. This game isn’t selling all that well over here, so maybe they were just cutting losses.

All right, significantly cutting losses.

I added the PS3 version of the game to my basket (a whopping £5 cheaper than the Xbox 360 version on sale) and proceeded to checkout. From what I played in the demo, I knew I wasn’t willing to spend anything other than pocket money for it, and for this price, I could sleep easy knowing that what I was paying wouldn’t break the bank.

After admiring some excellent quality literature, I finally got ’round to checking my e-mail again. I opened my e-mail client to discover some disturbing news: The seller had made a monumental cock-‘n’-balls-up. Also, I’m not recieving the item, I wasn’t charged for it, and there’s no free cookies. Well that blows, doesn’t it?

The worst part of it all is that they don’t even say they’re sorry.

Here’s the abridged jist:

As you are probably aware the price the product was listed at was significantly underpriced, this was caused by a “computer glitch” on our automated Amazon product upload

Of course, a “computer glitch.” Why the need for quotations? Anyway, the really interesting bit follows.

Normally we have 30/40 sales on a daily basis, however, today we have had over 1900 attempted purchases…

Well, you can’t blame them for noticing there was a problem. If the price is too good to be true, then it probably is.

This myth has to be busted. If a product is priced wrong at the till, the sale does not have to go through. In actuality, the seller has the right to back down from the purchase just as much as you do. If they’re wary that something’s amiss, it’s a certainty that they’re going to contest it. Especially if they’re a small outfit that doesn’t get much business.

So my suggestion is that if you see something that is clearly underpriced, try buying it anyway! Just don’t be disappointed if they notice and stop it from going through. It is what you get for trying to be a sneaky little sod.