The Accidental 1.6 Million Dollar Sale

It’s a bummer to make a mistake. It’s an even bigger bummer when that mistake ends up costing you 1.6 Million dollars! That was the reality for a zappos.com sister site, 6pm.com, last Friday. Between the hours of midnight and 6am, the site accidentally capped their products at $49.99 and considering their items routinely run into the $800-$1000 mark, that’s quite the deal.

Instead of voiding the transactions to cover their loses (a la the $9.99 52 inch Plasma TV from Best Buy), they have decided honor their prices:

"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." (read the whole letter)

It takes a big company to admit a mistake like that and then decide to eat the loss anyway. They sure lost a lot of money, but they gained a lot of respect in the process.

As a side note: In one of the updates Tony Hsieh, the CEO, answers the questions of whether anyone got fired and the answer is no, saying "...nobody was fired - this was a learning experience for all of us". Talk about sticking up for your employees as well as your customers!