There were Christmas shopping bargains galore on Amazon’s website over the weekend … for about an hour. Because of a technical glitch, the prices of thousands of items crashed to 1p – giving eagle-eyed customers a pre-Christmas treat while leaving scores of small family-owned businesses nursing heavy losses, with some warning they could enter the new year facing closure.
From 7-8pm on Friday, software used by third-party sellers to ensure their products are the cheapest on the market went haywire and reduced prices to as little as 1p. “Amazon is all kinds of broken,” one observer tweeted. “Mattress 1p. Headphones 1p. Batteries, clothing, games all 1p. Someone messed up big time.”
Martin Le Corre, who sells toys and games via his MB Housewares store on Amazon, told the Guardian that the glitch in software developed by RepricerExpress could have cost him more than £100,000.
“We got a call from a competitor to say ‘do you realise all your listings at a penny?’ By the end of the hour, we had 1,600 orders,” he said. “People were buying 10, 50, 100 copies of everything. It is £50,000, £60,000, £100,000 of stock; we can’t
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