Call them the Fiorello LaGuardia of cyberspace: when Amazon makes a mistake, it's a beaut. Like their recently advertised special for UK surfers to buy top-of-the-line handheld Hewlett-Packards for as little as £7.32 each. Didn't happen, folks, though it did cause a flood of bargain hunters whose bids for orders forced Amazon to shut down its British Website for a time this week.
Amazon said a price discrepancy caused a massive discount sale of Hewlett-Packard iPaq handhelds. That resulted in the iPaq H5450 offered for £23.04 and the iPaq H1910, £7.32 – way below the normal prices for those products (£500 for the H5450 in stores; £280 for the H1910), the company said in a statement. "We can confirm that there was a price discrepancy on the site for HP iPaq pocket PCs this morning," the Amazon statement said. "Despite our best efforts, with the millions of items available on our Website, unfortunately pricing errors can occur."
The bad news: Those whose orders for the bargain handhelds were accepted at Amazon UK won't be getting their bargains, since Amazon cancelled all the orders taken at the wrong prices, the company statement added.
