News

Error causes online retailer to sell iPads for £4

Want a brand-new iPad? It could have been yours for only £4 if things went the right way…

An error on the Currys PC World online store saw iPads with a normal price of £289 being listed for only £4 in the run-up to the Black Friday sales.

The company was embarrassed after online shoppers were mistakenly offered a massive £285 discount on a 9.7-inch 32GB Apple iPad instead of the intended £30. News of the £4 iPads spread like wildfire on social media.

The company removed the ‘special offer’ immediately after it noticed the glitch, and some shoppers reported that their orders were cancelled within hours.



It is not known at this stage how many iPad were ordered for £4, or whether any of them were actually sent to customers before the company started cancelling these deals.

One Twitter user said that he knew from the start that he wasn’t going to get the £4 iPad, but complained because nobody even bothered to email him.

Transactions made in a physical store become legally binding the moment the retailer accepts your money, so if they made a mistake with the price, they can’t claim the goods back afterwards.

At online stores, the same rules don’t seem to apply. Some online stores have, however, in the past succumbed under pressure and handed over the products at the advertised price.

In 2012, for example, Marks & Spencer advertised a £1,099 TV for £199, and afterwards started cancelling orders. It tried to placate customers with a £25 ‘goodwill gesture’.

Angry buyers, however, started an online petition to force the company to hand over the TVs at the agreed price, and it eventually decided to honour the advertised price. Apple has so far not commented on the issue.

Before you go

After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.

CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.

mac-pc

Tags

About the author

Chris

I've been a passionate evangelist for Apple and the Macintosh throughout my working life, my first love was a Quadra 605 working with a small creative agency in the south of Norfolk UK in the mid 1990's, I later progressed to other roles in other Macintosh dominated industries, first as a Senior graphic designer at a small printing company and then a production manager at Guardian Media Group. As the publishing and printing sector wained I moved into Internet Marketing and in 2006 co-founded blurtit.com which grew to become one the top 200 visited sites in the US (according to Quantcast), at its peak receiving over 15 million visits per month. For the last ten years I have worked as an Affiliate and Consultant to many different business and start ups, my key skill set being online marketing, on page monetisation, landing page optimisation and traffic generation, if you would like to hire me or discuss your current project please reach out to me here.

You can also follow me on: and

Add Comment

Click here to post a comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.