Wal*Mart's Preorder Policy: Caveat Emptor

By samson7point1
I kicked around the idea of getting Street Fighter IV at release or waiting until I could pick it up used. Anymore I don't buy stuff new unless there's an incentive like pre-order bonuses or truly limited edition packages. Initially I had decided against getting Street Fighter IV at launch, but had a last minute change of heart. I wanted to get the PS3 version because the bonuses were cooler than the 360 version. Normally I place pre-orders months in advance, but this time it was about a week ahead of time that I finally decided to get the game. When I tried to go through Gamestop to place my pre-order they were sold out of the collector's edition of the PS3 version.

No problem, I thought, I would just have to go somewhere else. I went to Wal*Mart's website and they had it listed, no problem. "Expected to ship on February 17th." So I signed in and placed my order. According to the site I was supposed to expect it to arrive on the 25th. (I went with the cheap shipping.) A day later, I happened to look at the site again and noticed that the item had been marked "Not sold online". Whew, I must have gotten my order in just in time.

February 17th came and I had not received a confirmation that my order had been shipped so I logged into the site to see the status of my order. It showed "In processing" and still "Expected to arrive on the 25th." On the 18th I checked it again and the status had not been changed so I sent a message to customer service asking if that was normal. What I got in return was a canned response about how it is normal for pre-order items in particular to take longer to get status updates. On the 19th I went to check my order again and found that it had been cancelled by Wal*Mart. Evidently they had sold me something that they did not have.

Sometimes "collector's edition" just means that the publisher chucked in $5 worth of extras and charged $20 more for the game and has nothing to do with scarcity. Other times, it means that they have truly limited the production of the special packages and they will only be available to pre-orders or on the first day of sale. Unfortunately the Collector's Edition of Street Fighter IV for the PS3 is one of the latter. By release date it had sold out at retail everywhere. The only way I could get that version of the game was to buy it through a reseller in a secondary market like Ebay. Of course the resellers demand a considerable markup. The average price on Ebay as of the 19th was $60 more than the retail price of the game.

What this comes down to is that trusting Wal*Mart to honor my pre-order has cost me $60 or never getting the version of the game that I want.

When I contacted Wal*Mart to complain about this, they very politely told me to go screw myself because they have a clause built into the purchase agreement (something I don't recall having seen) that basically says pre-order from us at your own risk.

I'll certainly never make the mistake of pre-ordering anything from Wal*Mart again because they feel they are under no obligation whatsoever to honor it.

It may seem like a small thing in the scheme of things, but the entire purpose of pre-orders, from the consumer point of view, is to guarantee that you will get the item when it becomes available. Having an escape clause in their purchase agreements basically nullifies that.

Wal*Mart had to have had more notice than two days after release that they didn't have the item in stock, but did not bother to let me know until well after my window of opportunity to hunt down a copy at retail. They were very sorry for this, but refused to do anything to compensate me for it.

All in all I guess I should have known better than to trust Wal*Mart with something like that, but their website looks so legitimate and professional that I guess I just forgot for a moment how ruthless they are.

My only possible conclusions from this are:
1. Wal*Mart is too stupid to figure out how to keep current accurate information about inventory on their web page. I highly doubt this because not having good information is likely to cost them money.
2. Wal*Mart is too lazy to keep current accurate information about inventory on their web page because the web page is really just an afterthought and not a serious business. After all isn't the brick and mortar business their real focus?
3. Wal*Mart intentionally misleads customers who pre-order limited release items to take business away from its competitors even though it can't fill the orders. After all, I didn't get to buy the game from Best Buy because I thought my pre-order with Wal*Mart was good. They effectively deprived Best Buy of my money.

Either way, pre-ordering stuff from Wal*Mart is, according to their own "purchase agreement": Caveat Emptor.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 3, 2009 at 6:33 PM

    I own Walmart stock but when I wrote asking them how much it was worth back in October last year at the email address: affiliates@walmart.com, they completely ignored me.

    I also saw on the news once where a woman went undercover to buy a bunch of things from them, nearly half of the items rang up more than they were marked. For example she had bought 13 of the same item (bras, as it so happened) and about 1/2 of them rang up more than the tag said while the rest rang up the same as what the tag said. She exposed them on National Television but obviously they still practice such things. Thanks for this blog.

    I'm never shopping there again.

    ReplyDelete

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