EricEwe.com

6pm.com, a sister company of Zappos.com took a big hit last Friday; at the same time they made a statement stating that they will honor all orders. An employee’s error in the pricing engine overwrote nearly all of its products to $49.95 on Friday for six hours, from midnight to 6 a.m.

It took the 6pm team several hours to notice the mistake. From 12am to 6am on May 21st all sales were capped at below $50 and the site managed to rack up $1.6 million in lost revenue because of it. Most companies would basically void all the orders and refer the customers to the T&C of the website which contained some verbiage about price mistakes.

Aaron Magness, director of brand marketing and business development mentioned that

While we’re sure this was a great deal for customers, it was inadvertent, and we took a big loss (over $1.6 million – ouch) selling so many items so far under cost. However, it was our mistake. We will be honoring all purchases that took place on 6pm.com during our mess up. We apologize to anyone that was confused and/or frustrated during out little hiccup and thank you all for being such great customers. We hope you continue to Shop. Save. Smile. at 6pm.com.

Among the items available at a steep discount was the Humminbird 1155C Chart Plotter NVB GPS system the site typically sells for $1857.85.

This is above and beyond what you call “Customer Comes First”.

I wondered what happened to the employee that caused this error? If I was in his/her shoes, I would basically apologize profusely and hand in my resignation letter. This is not $16 or $160 where you can repay your company.

Zappos was sold to Amazon for $928 Million in July 2009. I wonder if Amazon had a say in this as any price mistakes on Amazon will never be honored per their website usage policy.