Next time you go shopping online and you see a price that seems too good to be true… it just might be. This seems like an obvious caveat, however, there is a certain amount of trust and respect attributed to major portals like Yahoo! Shopping so a cheap price might just seem like an incredibly good buy. In this case, however, the discount was a bit more than even the average imagination could have predicted. A mistake in the XML shopping feed at Yahoo! Japan prompted 100 million sales of an Apple eMac computer at a 98% discount! That’s right, the eMac was sold for the equivalent of $25 per computer, a discount of $1100 USD. When Catena, the Tokyo based computer firm discovered the mistake, chaos ensued as they contacted 20,000+ buyers to negate the sales. According to Catena they did not have to honor the sales because they did not confirm them by email.
So next time you find yourself with a 98% discount don’t get too excited until you receive confirmation of the sale 😉