Judging from the number of people here who did, it would be pretty coincidental if it was not. Perhaps your spam filter is better than ours.
Bastards just sent out an e-mail cancelling the orders. :-(
Fine. I’ll wait till it’s $19.99 and buy it then.
I just got that email too. Fuckers.
Yup, cancelled.
Cancelled.
I feel like I’ve been phished into signing up for Target’s spam list. Amazon’s page clearly indicated that the game was priced $30 dollars lower than retail when I pre-ordered it, suggesting that the $20 price tag was more than just an “error”. Hope something is done about this.
Looks like I haven’t gotten an email yet, but the order has mysteriously vanished as well.
At this rate I’ll have no places left to boycott.
My order was just cancelled as well, I didn’t get any Target spam though.
I got the email. Oh well, that’s life. I won’t be buying it at regular price, though.
My order was missing, so I emailed amazon, and then I got the cancellation email. They do claim that it was a pricing error, but that’s not terribly believable. It was clearly marked as a discount, and the discount was removed weeks ago, but they only cancelled the orders today.
Tempted to contact BBB.
My order was cancelled as well. I guess I’ll wait on reviews then since at $50, its no longer an impulse buy. Its a shame though, I think they would of made more money letting all the $20 orders go through. Then again, I guess they would only need to sell around 1.5x less to break even at $50.
Unless Amazon/Target’s cost is greater than $20, which is entirely likely on a $49.99 game.
The PUBLISHER might have made more if they’d priced the game at $20 to $25, though. I’m not buying at $50, but I probably would have at under $30. (And probably will when it hits that price.)
As for whether this was a mistake or an attempt to build a Spam list, use Occam’s razor, people.
Nice scam, I think I’ll call Amazon from the law office tomorrow. I may also call my cousin who formerly worked for the State Attorney General Consumer Fraud division to bounce the facts off him.
They cancel right after all the spam goes out, seems a pretty clear deception to me.
The most deceptive element was the clear indication on the product page that HoMM 5 was $30 less than its retail price:
List Price: $49.99
Price: $19.99
You Save: $30.00 (60%)
And the e-mail calls it an error. Seems more like a clearly marked, intentional discount to me.
Of course it was removed several weeks ago. So much for that.
To me the removal of the discount weeks before the cancelling of the orders indicates seller’s regret rather than error.
Do you think this stuff:
List Price: $49.99
Price: $19.99
You Save: $30.00 (60%)
…is coded by a human?
I’m sure Target shares a database of stuff they also want to offer on Amazon. It contains the retail and regular price, thus of course the discount was shown. Someone f’d up the sale price in Target’s database, and that carried over to Amazon.
To think this was all a mail harvesting scheme is cuckoo. Hell, the ill will it generated among all of us nullifies any marketing possibilities it opened up.
It’s a pisser, but you have to be a conspiracy theorist to think it was planned.
Someone had to flag the price as discounted at some point, and this isn’t the first time a price was changed by a factor of 200%+ prior to shipping (ok, ok, only second).
The “coincidental” arrival of spamage in all of our mailboxes is also, er, odd.
So what’s wrong with being a conspiracy theorist?
The “spam” angle is pointless bullshit, no one will care.
The better angle here (and more irritating) is simply that they offered a clear price on a product, accepted an order/contract, and then attempted to unilaterally say, “No thanks.”
Yes, that sucks, but they have every right to do that. There is nothing illegal about changing prices, as long as you don’t hold the customer to the new price.
But they aren’t saying that they decided to change the price. They are saying that it was an error, which I don’t buy.
I just got the target email.
Subject: Welcome to Target.com!
From: “Target.com” <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, January 22, 2006 4:26 pm
To: emailaddress
Tin-foiled again.