Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

One possible explanation is a typo in the quantity of the items the supplier was providing to Best Buy. Unlike a typo in the price of an item—which could be flagged either by software or by a supervisor who thinks that 58 cents for a laptop seems low—an error in the input of quantity might not raise any red flags. And if the error makes the number higher and the typical quantity of this discounted special deal is particularly small, it might really not be obvious to anyone.

On top of that, have this all happen during an extremely busy Black Friday. The orders are processed and sent to fulfillment. When fulfillment can’t find the items to complete those orders, the department is likely told to set them aside and fill the orders that it can fill. That mess will be cleaned up later, a supervisor might say.

It might take quite some time before fulfillment finally suspects something strange is going on and someone calls purchasing to verify the numbers. Once the problem is discovered, there might be insufficient time to fix it.

But things get complicated at this point. What Best Buy did was to not only refund those orders but send giftcards to those customers—giftcards worth as much as the original purchase.

Here’s the confusion: Best Buy seems to be saying that it could have gotten more product, but not at the promised price. For double the price (well, almost double, given that a $400 Best Buy giftcard certainly costs Best Buy a lot less than $400), why didn’t the retailer invest that money and purchase the original items for those customers?

Best Buy stresses that this incident impacted fewer than one percent of its E-Commerce customers, so why not spend the money to make the problem go away?

One Best Buy spokesperson even told a reporter for a consumer daily that the chain says right on its Web site that it has the right to cancel any orders at any time for any reason. That’s a dangerous message to send to prospective customers.

The very next day, Best Buy issued a news release touting more special online deals and—we couldn’t make this up—included the following quote attributed to Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge: “In these final days of holiday shopping, Best Buy brings peace of mind to customers searching for the perfect gift at a great value.” Last minute explanation-less gift cancellations are hardly the stuff of customer peace of mind.