Software Testing Blog

When the dust settled on our Battle of the E-Tailers last month, Amazon.com performed exceptionally well – scoring high marks for its usability, feature set and a host of other categories. In fact,  74% of our testers said they trusted Amazon most for their holiday shopping in the post-Bug Battle survey.

But despite the fact that hundreds of testers were scouring their site for flaws, at least one MAJOR software bug went unnoticed: a $3 billion validation error, as recently reported by NetworkWorld.

Apparently, a Californian software engineer in the market for a Discovery Channel ‘Cells’ CD-ROM was able to find an edition on Amazon. No surprises here. The only problem (aside from the fact it only runs on Windows 98), was that the price tag for the item was about $3 billion. Plus $3.99 shipping and handling, of course. Seeing the price, and knowing full well that Amazon would settle the issue in a fair and timely manner, he decided to purchase the item on a lark. Here’s his first hand account:

I mentioned I was an engineer, so we talked for a few minutes about e-commerce validation routines and such. He described a number of measures they had in place to make sure orders with erroneous too-low prices would get caught; but nothing like that existed for the other extreme.

The best part: He explained that Amazon would be implementing such limits ASAP — and therefore my transaction would be the largest Amazon purchase ever!

Amazon was very professional about the whole situation. The caller acknowledged there was some humorous aspect to it, but made it clear they treat the shopper’s experience with the highest regard and they wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. I felt the message was sincere — it was really nice to get the call.

If there’s a better example of how to handle your customers (as well as your own reputation) when an issue arises, I’d love to hear it.