Dell tells hard drive customers hard cheese

DELL IS refusing to allow customers who ordered a 250Gb hard-drive from its website to actually buy the hardware because it said that the listing was a mishtake.

The website advertised 250GB hard-drives at Aus $8.80 instead of the usual Aus $600 and got heaps of publicity on the Whirlpool and Overclockers online forums.

Hundreds of punters ordered the drives and paid out on their credit cards. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, one guy splashed out and bought 60 harddrives. Although it was not clear what he wanted 60 of them for.

A Dell spinster said it was all a terrible mishtake and the price was $8.80 just to ship the hard-drive and customers are going to have to stump up for the extra.

Aussie Dell customers are a little miffed at that, particularly since Dell seems to have charged their credit cards before refusing to front up with the goods.

As one punter said, Dell was bound to have problems with him if he wanted to cancel an order after he had made payment on a different product.

The Dell spinster pointed to a get out clause on the site which said the outfit was not responsible for any errors on its website.

This could be an interesting one as far as the law is concerned, because technically Dell made an invitation to buy, with an advertisement and customers paid legal tender for a product says it will not honour the contract.

When Big Blue was hit in a similar case a couple of years ago it bit the bullet and allowed the 220 customers who bought $2049 laptops for $201 to get away with it.

Of course in the case of IBM the matter was aggravated by the fact that the inadvertently revealed all the customer's names and email addresses in an email they sent out.

More here. µ