What Appliances Online’s John Winning did when he realised a pricing error would cost him nearly $100,000 in sales

It took Appliances Online founder John Winning just five minutes to choose between disappointing nearly 200 customers, or losing nearly $100,000 in sales.

Winning was faced with this conundrum earlier this month, when a glitch in his company’s online pricing system listed a blue KitchenAid Mixer and Spiralizer bundle for just $281, down from the actual price of $799.

Though just a few customers snapped up the bargain at first, it was soon posted to deals website OzBargains, and a total of 190 customers managed to purchase the machine before the pricing error was picked up and addressed.

Speaking to SmartCompany, Winning says it took him and his team a matter of minutes to decide the right course of action after the error was fixed, deciding to cop the loss and honour all 190 purchases.

“It was a pretty easy decision — lose close to $100,000 dollars or disappoint 190 potentially life-long customers,” Winning says.

“I didn’t think the pricing was so obviously wrong that customer would have known it was a mistake, they probably just thought it was an insane deal.”

“If we had listed it for a dollar or something like that it’d probably be a different story.” Read more

Dominic Powell - Smart Company - 27 Oct 2017