The customer is always right – which is why organizations that protect consumers exist. In a recent Dell pricing mishap at www.dell.com.tw it reduced the price of a 20” and a 19” monitor from NT$7500 and $7999 to NT$500 and NT$999 (approximately RM50 and RM99.90) respectively. The issue took 8 hours to be resolved, but it was 8 hours late; over 140,000 units were already purchased.

Evidently, Dell was unable to fulfill such request thus received hundreds of complaints that were then handled by the officials of the Cabinet-level Consumer Protection Commission (CPC) and Fair Trade Commission (FTC). Out of many suggestions received such as continuing to deliver these 140,000 units, or deliver ONE NT$500 unit to each customers and then give respective discounts to other orders, Dell chose togive out NT$1000 to NT$3000 discount vouchers instead.

It was also rumored that less than 10 days later, Dell’s website recorded yet another glitch, this time, giving unnecessarily a huge discount to one of their notebooks. This time they took about 9 hours to fix the website – by closing down the website entirely.

(Source: The China Post)