The Day Today

This isn’t the first time (and almost certainly not the last) that a product has shown up online for an inaccurate price. Apparently a Tesco employee is responsible for the slip up, and several Xbox 360 consoles were ordered (one customer apparently ordered almost 40 of them!)

If the error goes undetected passed shipping then the company must agree to the sale at the price, however I suspect that this was noticed in time and those who ordered might be lucky enough to get (just one) Xbox. I’d say it depends on the number of people that placed an order at the incorrect price.

I remember this happening with TVs many years ago in the early days of the Internet, and in this case the company decided to make a loss. I don’t think many orders were placed and it was certainly good publicity! Tesco effectively did this (although intentionally) with the digital SLR camera I bought earlier this year, and sold it at a small loss for just 24 hours. The orders apparently took months to fill, but I managed to get a Jessops store to price match - I was in the store for around 2 hours waiting for a decision, and then Jessops quickly changed their policy!

Last year I finally completed an ebook for a friend to sell online. It had taken a long time but we updated an old booklet he once sold into electronic form and made it available to purchase online. We did this at minimal cost, with me setting up the website and accounts with Paypal and PayLoadz. It was a great feeling to accomplish this but nothing beats the feeling you get when you make your first sale - this happened last month and we didn’t even realise until today! We wont be spending our £1.99 all at once, but it’s confirmation that the booklet has an audience and a great boost of enthusiasm to complete a second booklet.

I would say our second booklet is even more valuable as not only is it original but it covers a broad range of features within a large district of the London Borough of Croydon. Clearly this is mostly of interest to residents, but there’s plenty of those and hopefully a fair number who would be willing to pay a couple of quid for the information.

If you’re interested in the publications check out the CLEIS website, or if you’re thinking of producing your own eBooks I’d highly recommend PayLoadz for taking payments and delivering the products. The original booklet was produced in MS Word, but the new one is a bespoke PHP/MySQL project that uses XML/XSLT and Apache FOP to produce a PDF. It’s been a bit of a learning curve but a very valuable and rewarding one!