6pm.com, sister site of popular online shoe retailer Zappos, had some trouble with their pricing software that led them to mistakenly cap most product prices at $49.95 for a period of six hours. Honorably choosing to respect all completed deals, Zappos took a $1.6 million dollar hit that could have easily been prevented with easier to use pricing software.
Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos.com, Inc.):
We have a pricing engine that runs and sets prices according to the rules it is given by business owners. Unfortunately, the way to input new rules into the current version of our pricing engine requires near-programmer skills to manipulate, and a few symbols were missed in the coding of a new rule, which resulted in items that were sold exclusively on 6pm.com to have a maximum price of $49.95. (Items that are sold on both 6pm.com and Zappos.com were not affected.)
We already had planned on improving our internal pricing engine so that it will have a much easier-to-use interface for our business owners. We are also planning on adding additional checks and balances to hopefully prevent this type of thing from happening again.
For more information direct from the Zappos blog: 6pm.com Pricing Mistake
For more information on which pricing software is right for you, feel free to contact us anyitme.
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