Amazon Wields $25 Gift Certificates To Pacify Frustrated Comic Book Fans
The tale is a bit complicated. After word of the apparent sale began to spread, plenty of comics fans began to snatch up the books as quickly as they could, causing some of the graphic novels to climb toward the top of Amazon’s best seller lists. Within hours Amazon fixed the pricing glitches (which affected multiple items), and told some customers that rather than canceling their entire orders, they’d still receive a single copy of the books they purchased at the heavily discounted price. The only catch was that they’d only get one copy apiece (many people had purchased multiple copies). Quite a nice gesture considering that Amazon could have simply canceled the orders outright.
Unfortunately, something went wrong. This morning, Bleeding Cool reported that many (and perhaps all) of these single-copy orders had been canceled as well, without any kind of notice or email from Amazon. As it turns out, Amazon simply doesn’t have enough books in inventory to fulfill all the orders it promised, so it’s handing out $25 gift certificates as an apology for the inconvenience.
Not everyone who bought a Marvel book is getting a certificate — if you placed an order that was immediately canceled, then it sounds like you won’t get one. Some people should be actually getting their books in the mail. If you got an email saying your order was cancelled, you should be hearing from Amazon about this shortly.
It’s hard to really fault Amazon for this. Obviously there were some errors in miscommunication, but it really didn’t have to do any of this — every online retailer has a clause in their Terms of Service that doesn’t make them liable for pricing mistakes.