Just to clear things up:
1) You could not use 1-click ordering. You had to add one item to your cart, then another item. I'm not sure if you could add 1 item, then add the second item w/ 1-click and still be eligible for the sale- but the terms Amazon listed said this was not the case.
2) The item subtotal was for the complete costs of both sets. The promotion discount (which was the cost of the less expensive item) was then deducted from that total price on the checkout page. It was not as if you added both items to the cart and the subtotal showed $0.00 (or the difference between the cost of the two items if they were not the same price). Again, you did not see this promotion deducted until you were on the Place Order page.

I also agree that there is a difference between the people who placed 1 order, and those who placed multiple orders. I also agree that the tone of Amazon's email could any maybe should have been different. However, they had to come up with one email that covered all customers, including those who blatantly attempted to rip them off by placing multiple orders. They also knew - when creating this email - that all the recipients had purposely used a loophole in the promotion program in an attempt to get merchandise for no money - in some cases a lot of merchandise. So if it was your company, and you were in charge of crafting or approving the email - what would your tone be like?

I don't agree with the reasoning that the items should be returned, but because of the tone of the email, you will not return them. Seems like an excuse to keep them.

Are you referring to the "order summary" page when you say "Place Order page",
or are you referring to the page that comes up after, upon actually placing
the order?

If order summary, that goes along with what I've been saying (obvious mistake
as the discount does not match what you expected it to be),

ie;
Set 1 = $20
Set 2 = $20
Promotional discount = -$40

Is this correct? If so you don't even have to know basic math to see the error.
You'd just have to know that the discount was greater than the total price
of a set.

...and if after (if there even is one, I thought it just said thanks for the order
but I may be thinking of DVD Planet or DDD), then couldn't Amazon say the contract
was for what you saw when you clicked place order?

Nobody took advantage of a "loophole".

Some may have driven a semi through a 6 inch diameter hole, but there was no loophole. Amazon screwed up in their programming. They did not test the promotion, it's all their fault.

There wouldn't be an e-mail, and that's really all there is to it. I work in Loss Prevention for a major national retailer. Unfortunately, glitches and pricing errors happen. I can tell you from direct experience how I personally would have handled this:

1) Cancel as many open orders as possible (Amazon did this)

2) Attempt to have the warehouse stop shipment of as many orders as possible (Amazon probably attempted to do this, but it's incredibly difficult to stop orders after they have already entered the fulfillment stage)

3) Ask UPS to try to intercept as many packages as possible (I haven't heard anyone report having this happen; that would mean the customer got a shipping confirmation and a tracking number, but the package would have been intercepted at the destination city and returned to sender [assuming it was pulled off the truck in time])

4) Block any customer accounts that I felt were excessive in their abuse of the promotion. Would I block a customer who placed only a handful of orders? No. Even though I know the customer was being unethical, they played by the rules and took advantage of OUR mistake (in other words, they did not manipulate or bypass our systems in any way) . Would I block a customer who placed tens of orders? Probably. Even though no fraud was committed by the customer (I know the ethicists in the crowd are going to jump all over my choice of words right there), I have the right to say, "This is someone I choose not to do business with in the future." Odds are, this is going to be a customer who only pops up when there's a chance to exploit some kind of pricing error. The only way I would consider NOT blocking the account is if the customer had an extensive order history with us where they proved to be extremely profitable.

There would be no threatening calls, e-mails, etc. If our system allowed the customer to do something, it's unfair to punish or threaten them for playing by the rules, which were defined by us.

International Customer here.
Received my first 'free' order today. I noticed that in the included packaging slip, rather than listing the discounts x2 as the website and the emails did, it lumped them together into one promotional discount.

A question .. does the use of a gift certificate on Amazon come up with promotional discount on the order slip, or gift certificate?

Returning is out of the question for me being international. Their free return cost does not apply if you are an international customer, and im out $9US that I paid to get the items here in the first place.

True, the programming issue was their fault, but it was the fault of certain customers who took advantage of it. You may not care what what you did, or feel it was wrong - but it was not Amazons fault that someone ordered multiple sets. It might be my fault that I left my backdoor open, but they guy who came in and took my stuff would also carry some blame.

It is my understanding (and I could be wrong), that these people did not 'play by the rules'. The promotion text explained the rules, but people found a way around them. I am positive the rules did not state that someone could get mutiple dvd sets for free.

I agree though that the email might not have been the best option, though I don't know all the other options they attempted.

But did you package up your stuff, send it to the guys house via UPS/USPS, charge him for shipping the items and then thank him for robbing you????

Just to clarify what I meant by "playing by the rules"... Looking at this purely from a Loss Prevention standpoint, I would be asking questions like...
-Did the customer use a stolen credit card?
-Did the customer attempt to bypass any blocks that were on their account (for example, providing false information and/or opening multiple accounts)?
-Did the customer attempt to hack into any systems?

In this case, the customer simply added an item to their shopping cart, which is all they were required to do. The fact that the shopping cart did not process the order as the merchant intended is squarely the fault of the merchant, not the customer. If I'm the merchant, I would be busting heads in the IT department, not going after the customers.

Please keep in mind I'm simply approaching this from the perspective of someone in Loss Prevention. This is how I would handle this at my job, and it's probably how most LP departments at reputable companies would approach it. We don't get into ethical debates and discussions of obscure legal theories. The fact that Amazon is approaching it in this manner is mind boggling (I would be stunned if they had any authority in their agreements with the credit card issuers to issue subsequent charges).

Also has anyone received an answer to why they waited until 12/28 to send out these emails? They were aware of this glitch the day it happened. Fixed it and even canceled orders. Now I can understand not sending it out on the 23rd, the 24th and especially the 25th, but what stopped them from sending out this email on the 26th???

I disagree that it was the tone -- the tone certainly didn't help, but it's their reasoning that did it for me. You're arguing that we agreed to the text of the details, I'm arguing that I adhered to their terms of service and contracting, and their shipment denotes a completed sale. I don't think we're either going to convince to change positions, but I also think we're arguing semantics here to a degree. The *tone* of the email was offensive, but who cares, it's the options that they gave us to correct *their* error, and in my opinion it's illegal. I had to point out in my post that if everyone kept these sets then the level of Amazon service will go down, the price of goods will go up, etc... I was just making a point that there are reasons that could appeal to reasonable people. The people that ordered 50 sets aren't going to send anything back, no matter what.

Like I said, they decided to play bully here and it's hard to feel bad. I understand it feels like reasoning to keep my sets, but I'm not going to kill anybody if I do end up getting charged $35.99 (the cost of one of my two sets). It's the idea that there were so many different ways of going about this than what they did, both in tone and especially resolution. You asked what tone of email I would send and I agree with the above post that I wouldn't send one. I would not expect my customers to agree to an unauthorized charge after our transaction had been completed, period. If I was instructed to by our president, I would try to appeal to those rational customers that our business is suffering terribly because of a human error, and I would let them know that if they were to (in this case) keep the DVD sets, then they would no longer be considered a customer of mine.

I'm not making some grand moral stand here, it's $36 bucks, and I willfully and knowingly understood that I might have been charged that amount in the end. It's just upsetting that this is their resolution -- especially to a company that research would show I spend insane amounts of money with. I don't think any less of them as a company, but I know that if they feel to persue this avenue of intimidation that I'll just dispute it with my credit card and settle with whatever the resolution of that is. At this point it's just business, but it's nice to know that those that did order 50 sets might be looking forward to a hefty sum showing up on their CC.

target bit the bullet for their $5.99 box set fiasco of a year ago
deep discount bit the bullet when they let a few planet of the apes heads go for $0.89
overstock bit the bullet when they shipped out the charles dickens set and atl for free.

my question for amazon is would you like fries with that?

Don't you mean cheese?

You must have the only IT job in Miracleland if you found a company that lets you kick back, stress-free, during test time. Anybody who does QA for a financial system should have that same level of stress. If this f***-up happened where I work, nobody would be pointing fingers at the client, our group would eat the loss, and one or more people would probably be looking for work.

I still chuckle as I picture our team, working 80 hour weeks prior to our last deployment, whispering to each other "...at least we don't work at Amazon.com"

Very VERY well said. This is exactly how amazon should have handled this.
Unfortunately they seem to have poorly trained monkeys working for them that don't know the first thing about customer service.

Finally got a response to (most of) my questions from ECR.

So no explanation given as to why some people are being told to pay and others told they don't have to.

No mention of the illegal nature of their proposal.

At least people now know the options for international buyers though.

This was in reference to the T&Cs about cancellation of incorrectly priced orders pre-shipping. Only...if it doesn't relate to these orders, why did CS constantly quote this line from the T&Cs in their emails and the original email that started all of this?

That's a good point.

True, and that didn't occur to me until after I'd accepted and paid for the first two (silly me).

But after trying 4 times previously to get a response about international deadlines and refunds, it didn't look like I was going to get a response. So it seemed like a wiser idea to pay the fees and hold onto them than to hope they made it back in time and risk both being both being charged and not keeping the DVDs.

Greetings from Amazon.com

First, I would like to thank you for your ongoing support and continual purchasing throughout the years. Your purchase history is outstanding and I would personally like to keep your patronage. You are certainly the type of customer that we would like to retain.

After researching your account, I found that the mail which you received has been sent due to technical error and I offer my sincere apologies regarding this issue.

Rest assured that you will not be charged any extra amount for the below orders.

1. #102-xxxxxxxx
2. #102-xxxxxxxx
3. #102-xxxxxxxx

Therefore, I completely confirm that you need not return this items to us and will not receive such email from us again.

However, I confirm that this is a Technical Error from our side and I request you to ignore the message that we are going to charge you extra.

While I know this situation has scarred our appearance in your eyes, I do want to assure you that this was rare and is not typical of our normal service levels. Thank you for all of your patience and understanding. I do hope that you will honor us with another opportunity to prove the quality of our service to you in the future.

Hope to see you soon again at Amazon.com


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Best regards,

Vijay
Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.amazon.com

So much for that being their "final stance on this
issue".

An equally good point is that since Amazon made the screw up by not adequately testing their promotion through the complete process of order placement (and thus would have recognized their mistake) and because they still sent out the accepted orders even though the company recognized and repaired the error within hours of it going live, I should expect them to 1) accept the return of opened items because I received them before the 'pay us more money' email and 2) reimburse me my initial shipping charges. Their response email to me did not address either of these two expectations and only a few posters here have noted Amazon's agreement with the first point while none have noted anything about the second.

In response to i86time

From the same post TimeandTide pulled from

Anyone come across any mention in how promotions are handled in the TOS? No one here seems to be arguing that the items were priced incorrectly, so is Amazon saying because excessive promotion $$ were applied, the pricing error portion of the TOS is not valid? You should reply, OK Amazon made a 'promotion' error and not a 'pricing' error, sorry about that. If that 'pricing' error portion does not apply, show me where in your TOS it addresses a 'promotion' error and states in this type of situation the purchaser is responsible for the difference. If it does, I'll gladly return or pay the difference.