Negative savings at Overstock
Josh Posner writes, “I just wanted to share this fantastic deal with you guys over at www.overstock.com. Check it out, you can save -$9 on this smart disk. Got to love it.”
Hefty shipping charges at Griffin
Ed Wilde writes: “Just came across this at Griffin. This is what happens when you input a non-us postcode, shipping = $1,000,000.00…ooof!”
Search tag cloud at Masterfile
Ryan Feeley writes, “Stock photo company Masterfile.com has added a tag cloud, not based on
tags, but on the actual search history for a given image. Labelled as
‘Other searches that found this image.’ The bigger the tag, the more often it was used to view this image.”
Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.
4point44
on 27 Dec 06gotta love the negative savings on overstock.
Chris
on 27 Dec 06I spent a few years working on routing algorithms. Using a large value to represent a connection that is possible, but that you don’t want to take, is a common trick to use. I would guess that they are doing something similar. Rather than crash when computing postage for a ‘bad’ value, they instead default to an unreasonable value.
Michael S.
on 27 Dec 06I don’t buy it. If they can purposely display $1,000,000 (I agree that it sounds like they did it on purpose, that it’s not a math error), then they can print “Sorry, we only accept US postal codes at this time.”
Jim
on 27 Dec 06It’s clearly an error as there is a big error message about the shipping on the top…
Mrad
on 27 Dec 06I don’t think it’s such a clear error. I didn’t notice the error message until you mentioned it Jim. I think most folks would be more taken with the $1,000,000 shipping, vs. the error message that’s located on the periphery.
I mean, can’t these people read Defensive Design for the Web? Geez.
Ian
on 27 Dec 06I saw something similar on the negative savings thing at Maplin an electronics retailer in the UK. They had two items that were £5 each but you could buy them together as a sale offer for £14.99. According to them, you could even save £10.
Dr. Pete
on 28 Dec 06Love the Overstock glitch. That might be a good regular feature: “Algorithms gone bad”.
Just for fun, I tried to find out how big a package would have to be for UPS to charge a million bucks, but no luck. The biggest package they’ll send from Chicago, IL to Ealing, UK (W139EP) with residential service is 150 lbs. Grand total for UPS Worldwide Express: $910.87.
Josh
on 28 Dec 06The guys over at Overstock must read svn because the price is fixed now. http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PROFRAME&PROD_ID=2175964
Jake
on 28 Dec 06Josh, of course they read SvN. Everyone does, right?
This discussion is closed.