Your Source for 'Ff'lo

I received the same cancellation e-mail you did- which is clearly bullshit- and so here's the letter I sent to their help department (I've removed any identifying information because I'm paranoid, and you know who I am anyhow):

Hello.

I recently received an automated e-mail informing me that my order number [BLAH], placed on January 28, was cancelled due to "an error [which] caused an item or items on [this] recent order... to be displayed at an incorrect price." Though I received no similar e-mail for my orders [BLAH] and [BLAH], they have apparently been cancelled as well (despite the fact that I was not informed as such), because they have also vanished from my account.

This is thoroughly unacceptable. The cancellation notice I received made reference to the Amazon pricing policy, which “is posted in the [Amazon] Help section and is accessible through numerous other areas of our web site.” The pricing policy, as currently posted, clearly states, “we cannot confirm the price of an item until you order.” I did, in fact, order these CDs at a price of 99 cents apiece and received confirmation e-mails to that effect for each order. Ergo, according to the language of your policy, the prices were confirmed.

Furthermore, although the Amazon cancellation notice states, “At any given time, despite our best efforts, a small number of the millions of items on our site may be mispriced,” literally thousands of CDs in your catalog—specifically, many of those listed as being on the Phantom record label—were listed at a price of 99 cents on that particular day, and my orders were selected entirely from that set of items. (I personally searched at least 5,000 of them.) While more than five thousand items may admittedly still be a small percentage of the millions of items you sell, five thousand comparable and easily searchable items, listed as being on the same record label, which all display the same price on your site could not reasonably or logically be assumed to be a “small number” by consumers who believe that they have stumbled upon a sale. Customers such as myself, acting upon these prices in good faith, then received the aforementioned confirmation e-mails (those with the subject line “Your order with Amazon.com” dispatched from the e-mail address auto-confirm@amazon.com) in response to our orders, thus (in your own words) confirming the items’ price of 99 cents each.

As a result, Amazon.com is clearly legally bound to honor the orders that I submitted on January 28, by the language provided on your site.


[Okay, at this point, the letter becomes too long for me to post it as a comment on Livejournal, so I'll continue it below...]