Also, I find it very suspicious that every DVD in their entire inventory was 'On Order' for the last 6 hours of 2006. Sounds like they were screwing with people who had saved up their Google $10 credit.

Unless it went in and out of stock, I believe it was atleast 2 days rather than 6 hours. I had planned to place an order with them but was unable to do so. Ended up buying 8 movies at DVDEmpire instead.

Maybe. I was out of town for a few days and could only speak for the downage that I witnessed. 2 days? That's BS!

Which is consistent with what DVDPlanet is asking for ... a return of the product.

The Google Checkout deal ended on 12/26 and therefore was not part of some year ending scheme you've dreamed up in your head.

Plus there is no "saving" up of credits involved. It's not like there was a limit on the number of orders one could place through Google Checkout.

Maybe you would be a lot less suspicious of things if you thought things through.

The $10 off of $10 expired 12/31.

Maybe you would make sense is you knew what the f*** you were talking about.

The $10 of $10 purchase was valid up to 12/31 for anybody who registered by the deadline.

If there's an upside to this, at least you now have a list of customers you can ban from doing business on your site, if they can be proven to have manipulated the cart in the manner you describe. In my business, we often have to "fire" certain customers for, among other things, abuse of return priveleges, failure to pay in a timely manner, and (attempting) to manipulate special sale conditions. Kind of like what has happened to you.

Good luck with this...I've always liked your business, and had nothing but positive experiences with your website. I hope this all works out in your favor.

A lot of people getting 20 free titles might be the cause of low stock too, if there was cost involved I doubt so many would have been purchased.

Well riddle me this Genius, how the heck does a $10 off credit that Google is taking the bath for hurt DVDPlanet?

What you said was: Well riddle me this ... blah blah blah.
What I heard was: You are right, Peep, I don't have any idea what I'm talking about so I'm going to completely change the subject and hope nobody notices.

Nice try.

My point was that either this was a enormous f***-up on their part or they did it for a reason. I'm pretty sure the reason was Google-related and it ended up screwing honest customers, so f*** them.

Do you seriously not get that? Or are you just trying to start a fight?

Was I unclear when I said "every DVD in their inventory"? Are you really suggesting that these "20 free titles" people bought up their entire store?

But the problem is, for people like the original poster who didn't notice the extra dvd and didn't think they did anything wrong, I'm guessing they feel a) the notice should have been more polite and less accusatory and b) they didn't do anything wrong or against policy so there's no need to pay whatever balance DVDplanet feels they are owed or send the dvd back since the transaction has been completed. If DVDplanet feels that, in fact, there was no contract for the transaction, given the tenets in the linked article, then there's a process to go through. Just because DVDplanet sends out 'pay or return' notices doesn't mean they MUST be honored. When the two parties can't work it out, they become litigants.

Well, that would explain why they would do something so desperate as threaten their customers.

Nope no fight and I'm moving on as this is my last post on the subject. You bring up schemes against consumers without bringing up any logic on how it helps the merchant. Then when I flat out ask you, you do the mambo dance of changing the subject. I get it and so will everyone else.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, you give yourself away with this "screwing honest customers, so F*** them" response.

Clearly you have an attitude about merchants and are not objective in treating them fairly.

But what goes around comes around and if you have that approach to them ... well hopefully you can see where this leads.

Either way, enjoy having the last word.

Actually we had the inventory file corrupted when it was uploaded to our server. This caused the status to be reflected on the site incorrectly. This resulted in lost sales and I can assure you I don't do anything that would discourage orders....

I don't really want to get involved in this (yes, I do), but shouldn't there be some QA step where whomever packs the items into the boxes for shipping checks the orders to make sure they're legit?

You would think so. Maybe they should start penalizing the packers when they ship out 20 dvd sets for the price of one. Then maybe they'd pay attention to what they were doing.

I just want to say this:

First off, for Mark from DvdPlanet to come on here and DISCUSS this with our community is a very good thing for all of us. Mark, thank you for taking the time. I feel somewhat bad that you are being attacked, and i think its just more timing after the Amazon thing than anything else. I have had nothing but positive experiences with your store.

I feel this and the Amazon thing, in a GENERAL sense, are very different things. here, people "cheated" the system and in amazon's case, the system "cheated" them. one is clearly an attempt by customers to manipulate the cart in their favor. in Amazons case, though people may have knowingly placed the order because of the mistake, no steps were taken other than adding the items to the cart.

Was the amazon thing right? we can debate that all day. Knowingly manipulating a cart is a whole nother ball game in my book, and that is something that, personally, i feel a company can and should look into, and recoup whatever losses they can. especially in this case where it was GOOGLE's checkout that cause the problem, not theirs.

Thank you again for taking the time to post here Mark. It's always nice to see etailers involved in things like this, even if you do have to fight for it sometimes.

I don't feel bad at all that he's being "attacked". The fact remains that he has yet to explain to us exactly how people "manipulated" the cart. He has yet to explain if it was this, or a glitch in his system.

Comments made by myself and others about how responsibility should be shifted to the packing employees within the company, instead of throwing out accusations at customers, have gone ignored.

To the last poster, do not assume that people cheated the system until we hear details about what happened...which we have yet to hear.

looks like he said "it was a result of...people findinga way to manipulate the cart into not working as intended..."

sounds like he said thats what it was

maybe i'm fighting for the wrong guy here, but come on. again, my whole point was that HE is here defending himself and his company. all we have gotten from Amazon is 42 different answers

How is a probably minimum wage warehouse worker supposed to be held responsible for something like this? Do you know how many orders one of these folks probably fulfills a day? Most often they don't even see an invoice or an order. Warehouse management systems tell them what to pull from inventory without regard to specific orders and they just pick and pack. Not to mention packing employees, as you call them ,do not see invoices with $$ on them. The only folks who see full order info are CSR's and even then they probably process thousands a day. So i'm sure it was overlooked at first.

I give credit to Mike from DVDPlanet for coming on here and facing the hoards. He's trying to give the straight poop, give the guy a break.

Unless my idea of how such e-tailers are run is completely off-base, it seems a little silly to expect the packers to double check that all of the orders are priced correctly. Mark, you'd know first hand, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that the ordering and shipping departments have very little to do with each other. I would assume the shipping department's job is solely to take DVDs listed on an invoice, put them into a box, place the address on the box, and ship it. Not to knock on anyone who does the job, but it's unskilled labor. The shipping dept. should have no reason to have to keep up on what sales the site is running (B1G20 is one thing, but how do they know if a B1G1 is legit?), much less current prices on items, promotional codes, use of gift certificates (or frequent buyer's points in DVDPlanet's case).

The moment you have the shipping dept. double-check invoices for accuracy you add a pretty large amount of man hours (and training), considering the size of some of these companies. In the case of Amazon, especially -- to expect a shipper to know current prices on everything from DVDs to diamonds is pretty unreasonable. Granted, this means the onus falls on someone else, so the company is not entirely off the hook. But to say that "I received the DVDs for $x.xx, therefore they are mine." is a valid excuse gives a helluva a lot of power to hackers worldwide. No, Mark has not detailed the manipulation in this instance, nor should he have to just because we want to debate the ethics and/or attack his business practices. He is only responsible to detail this to the customers who (ab)used it and to whatever legal institutions may require it, should the situation carry that far. However, it would appear that the OP's issues are being handled by Mark in a satisfactory way and that he's not an unreasonable man. These situations can be handled case by case, but the easiest way to do so is to let the cases make their arguments to you after approaching them all in one blow.

I'm giving DVDPlanet the benefit of the doubt as far as the unknowns go, because a) they've always been good to me; b) it annoys the piss out of me when people avoid rationality in favor of a "win at all costs" mentality; and c) the OP has already expressed his (somewhat) understanding of the way this has been handled -- do you profess to have a greater knowledge of the case than those directly involved?

-Toilet Dcuk