After a pricing mistake launched Gran Turismo 5 to the top of Amazon.com’s UK sales charts, the web’s largest retailer announced today that it will be cancelling all those pre-orders for the game. Here’s the email sent out to everyone this morning who had their copy on reserve:
“Dear Customer,
We are writing to inform you that the price for the item [Gran Turismo 5] was displayed incorrectly at the time you placed the above referenced order. Despite our best efforts, with the millions of items available on our website, pricing errors can occasionally occur. In our Pricing and Availability Policy , we state that where an item’s correct price is higher than our stated price, we contact the customer before dispatching. All affected orders have now been cancelled. If you still wish to purchase this item, please place a new order online as from tomorrow, which will be charged at the correct price, when we dispatch it to you. Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused by this error, and rest assured that we will continue to make every effort to maintain the accuracy of all prices on our site. We look forward to serving you again in the future.
Warmest regards,Customer Service DepartmentAmazon.co.uk”
Sony Europe probably won’t be too happy about Amazon asking a portion of their customers to pre-order the game a second time, though most people who ordered it at the £17.59 ($29.02) price point had to know something suspicious was going on. It’s back up to £39.99 ($65.98) now , and will no doubt stay there for long time to come. Was your order cancelled? If so, will you re-order on Amazon, or take your business elsewhere?
Play.com just got lucky………..
Shame that Amazon is UK and not NL based in this case, in NL a store has to sell it for the advertised price. A law that changed after someone bought a Citroen XM or something (yes a brand new car) for nothing more than 1 Apple and 1 Egg (Dutch proverb, ‘for an Apple and an Egg’ means something is cheap), the law now doesn’t go for proverbs, or plain errors such as €900 instead of €9000 for a brand new car.
However in this case £18 instead of the £32/39 they would have been obliged to sell it for that price. And I think Amazon should have, I mean it took them 3 days to find out that people had ordered it on the ‘wrong’ price. Yea right, sounds to me like an action to get attention that they left going too long so too many people ordered it for the low price.
Haha, I love it! I made it clear in the forums that Amazon would cancel ALL orders made at that price, because clearly it was an error on their part, but no, people had to disagree. Well, just shows what people know about consumer law.
When you place an order online or over the phone, NO CONTRACT IS MADE UNTIL MONEY IS TAKEN. Prior to that, what you see is an invitation to purchase at a proposed price. Until both parties agree that price, and money changes hands, no contract exists, and so they can do what they want with the orders. In this case, cancel them.
The price guarantee on Amazon (and most places) relates to orders that are accepted and go through to completion (i.e. they take money and ship the goods). The agreement is that if the price goes up, you do not get penalised.
I order from Amazon all the time and have no problems at all with their service or ethics. I guess some people are just greedy. None of you who ordered at that price have actually lost anything, so quit crying like stupid little babies. Pathetic.
I will never buy from amazon again as i told my son he would be getting this game and we bought a steering wheel to go with it.
I told him it was a guaranteed price no matter what (well that’s what it said on lying amazon,s website)
why do companies get off with this
amazon rip
Was rather annoyed with this, when you pre order a game which clearly states “you get it at this price even if the price goes up” or words to that effect, your kind of expect to be able to get it….
Given that they arnt exactly quick at getting new games dispatched for release date (even with next day postage) I certainly wont be reordering my copy of GT5 from them, and will be seriously reconsidering renewing my Prime membership when that comes up!
I won’t be buying from Amazon again. I thought this was one of their unique pre-order prices which often use to promote their pre-order price guarantee.
They need to update their systems using the “four eyes” principals if they are to avoid future reputational damage.
Well, Amazon cancelled my order, so I’m going to ‘cancel’ buying anything else from them for at least a year or more.
Tamagochi is to scared to realease the date. Ignore the guy and he will give us a realease date…
“The official release date of GT5 is April 1, 2010. it’s official really! And it will come out with two version one is the basic that cost $60 with 6 cars and 6 tracks, the premium version on the other hand got 1000 cars and cost $1000, plus a GT can opener! Cool!”
It came from sony. :lol: Not!
haha, i think Brandon meant 12/21/12
Well, I won’t be ordering from Amazon now…. Unless they get some sort of pre-order bonus obviously :D
Thanks brandon. Now what 12-02-12 means?
the release date is 12-02-12
Jordan can’t we just have the release date!?
You said we’d like it! So just tell us you retard!
ahahahahaha first the release date denied by Sony and now the cancelation of all the pre-orders…way to go amazon XD
@ vitz: We can’t be sure if there really will be, as you named it, a Premium and Peasant version.
The news where we got the info about two possible versions could have been refering to the PSP (peasant) and PS3 version (premium) or even that one version would be the full game and the other a cheaper version that would update the GT5 Prologue to full GT5.
F@#$ the police
To RT*//WNDWLCKR3000: Better yet, at the August 18th Sony press conference at GamesCom in Cologne, Germany! (See the post from Jordan on August 2nd on the main page of this site)
But personally, I don’t expect to hear anything until TGS, like you said. Its near the GTPSP release date so it makes more sense.
I dont caaaaaare, just give a damn release date!!!!!
How is it possible to put a pricetag on a game that hasn’t been announced yet?
KY recently announced….. that he will announce the releasedate, anywhere soon…..
That’s for as far as I know the last official news from PD.
My hope on THE announcement beeing made is set at the Tokyo Game Show
from 24-27th of september.
i recieved this email today, knew it was always coming. if rumours are to be believed, GT5 is coming in two flavours (premium and peasant – although i may have just made those names up)….i was always going to pick up the higher end SKU anyway, but getting it cheap wouldn’t have hurt.
won’t be buying it from amazon, not that i’ve fallen out with amazon, just i can’t be waiting around for the postperson with such an important title such as GT5
I’ll personally order it from a local store, and pick it up on launch day. Even if I had pre-ordered it for $15 and they jacked it up to $150, I’d still be buying it.
scratch that, i thought we were talking about GT PSP, (fucking moron¬¬)
Now if only Amazon’s American division would issue an apology to the people that are/were/will be taken in by the release date of December 29th, 2009 that they still have posted.
Too much to ask?
I shouldn’t think people will re pre-order from amazon seeing as they’ve jacked the price to £39.99 and you can pre-order it for £24.99 from Play.com.
Fail on Amazon’s behalf
I mean amazon
What do you mean, Tomaz? I don’t see how Polyphony Digital could have been involved in this at all?
Smart move from PD.