Quick update and an apology
I just wanted to apologize to anyone that made a purchase on our site this morning that was subsequently cancelled. One of developers updated the code to our website late last night (2:00 am here in California) while the rest of us were sleeping. It wasn't until this morning that we realized he had enabled an automatic pricing feature that wasn't fully tested yet. As a result, we were offering to sell bitcoins at a loss this morning for about 4 hours.
I would love to have fulfilled those orders, and it would have been a customer service win of the first order, but it also would have meant that we took a loss of about $2,000. Honestly it was a tough choice, and our customer service rep really resisted when I told her that we would have to cancel those orders. I hope the members of this community can sympathize with the challenges of pricing our products in dollars, in an environment where the selling price of bitcoins varies by as much as $100 depending on where you buy.
We're interested in making things right with our customers, so feel free to shoot me a PM if you got stung by this error on our part and I'll happily send you a discount code for future purchases.
Thanks
Ouch.
That's not a very fortunate occurrence.
However, you might have done well to have left out your hypothetical loss priced in dollars....
For example, now I know that $2000 is worth more to you than having, as you put it, "a customer service win of the highest order".
You would rather NOT sell at a loss (when the mistake was clearly on your end... similar to a store advertising a price, and then at the check-out register, the price is raised or the order canceled), than please your customers.
Your customers didn't ask for you to mis-price your items, and they did not ask to have their orders cancelled.
You were willing to turn them off to your business for $2000.
I'm not meaning to come in your thread and talk ill of your company, but the fact that you stated that if you hadn't canceled the orders, that you would have lost $2000, tells me how much (like, actual dollar figure) you value customer service. Had you left that amount out of your post, I might have supposed that your hypothetical loss would have been much higher, and thus perhaps I would have been more accepting of your treatment of your (would-be) customers.