Fat fingered is one thing. The best price error I’ve seen was something else:

In 2020 the German government lowered VAT in a reaction to covid from 19% to 16%.

On the first day Amazon had reduced thousands of products by exactly 19% and only increased by 16% after a few hours. AFAIK they did honor every sale during that time.

I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind?

Aldi iirc just kept the old prices and simply gave a 3% discount at checkout

> Aldi iirc just kept the old prices and simply gave a 3% discount at checkout

I get your point, but they probably gave a discount of 1-(1.16/1.19) =~ 2.5%

Right. Since it was limited to a few months only I believe they just accepted the loss, put out some ads with 3% discount etc. Same with the lower VAT for food products.

Probably also rounded down in favor for the customer but I can’t remember the details

>I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind?

I suppose it's the same codebase as any other country's amazon, and there's a different VAT rate in every country.

VAT is baked into retail prices in Germany. And retail prices are typically either something round or end in .99 or so; ie not arbitrary.

So it's unlikely their German prices would just take the same input as eg Dutch prices and changed the VAT around.

I know how VAT works. If the government changes the VAT overnight then prices won't round to .99 until merchants (or Amazon themselves) change the base price again. I don't see the issue.

Usually in B2C prices are quoted and agreed upon as gross price (including tax). If the tax rate is lowered, this then raises the base price.

I mentioned this, because American retail prices as quoted typically don't include their equivalent of VAT.

I looked this up just now and apparently Amazons case is more complicated due to things like sold by Amazon (16%) vs third party sellers (they got to choose if they pass it down to the customer or not). It was an economy stimulus after all.

And apparently fixed book prices (printed on the back) were up to every single publisher to decide about

Then you also have different VAT rules depending on the product category. Food is 7% in Germany.

Lastly I also remember that Amazon gift cards were weird for a few hours. Something like you pay 48.50 and got 50€ worth of credit. I can’t remember if you could then use that credit to buy new gift cards.

Lots of ways where this becomes quite a complex problem real fast

Amazon sold all e books from Luxembourg to UK customers, charging them 3% VAT. When calculating royalties for publishers though, their contracts stipulated the 20% VAT rate would be used to reduce royalties. According to The Guardian, some received just 10% of the purchase price, similar to what Audible(also Amazon owned) is being accused of. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/21/amazon-fo...

Uber also sold UK journeys to UK customers but put the fare calculation taximeter in a server in another country to avoid the 20% VAT. I believe they actually won that case as in the EU, VAT is calculated by the seller using their country's laws regardless of the buyer's country's VAT rates and laws.

Since 2015, VAT on eBooks is charged according to the buyer's country, see e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/electronically-supplie... This is also reflected on my invoices from Amazon.

VAT law is harmonized across the EU, which country's rate is applicable is based on a rather complex (and ever changing) set of rules, but nowadays it's mostly the buyer's country.

Amazon has a worked hard to develop a reputation of being pro-consumer. And yes they will eat consumer facing errors. I have not heard the same reputation made about vendors, and in fact I've heard quite a few horror story rumors about how they treat vendors. And these complaints (vague as they are) seem to focus on Amazon passing the cost of their customer obsession to their vendors.

But yes, I expect if Amazon accidentally sold me an item for 1% of its actual value due to a typo they will honor it. I expect if they send me the wrong item they'll make it right. As a consumer, I'm not worried about them fixing any errors in their favor and ignoring any errors in my favor.

I just don't expect them to treat their vendors the same way.

Well, in some countries they're legally bound to anyway.

Oh, I expect them to obey laws. And I certainly don't automatically believe that they are screwing over vendors in the same way I'll automatically believe claims of them going out of their way for customers. I was mostly pointing out that how they treat customers is not necessarily related to how they treat vendors.

I remember that deal being shared online, and being corrected fairly quickly.