A new first for Kogan: no further comment post-site snafu

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 10 August 2011 11:58

Your IT - Home IT

Normally happy to shout from the rooftops, Kogan has instead made a statement post his first major money-sucking site snafu and says he is 'not available for further comment'.

Is it the latest Kogan stunt, or a genuine pricing snafu that has been turned into the silver lining of free publicity - something that Kogan normally doesn't need to 'pay' for?

I guess we'll never know the 'truth', just as we'll never know whether Apple's lost-in-a-bar iPhone 4 scandal was a real accident - or a really clever way to turn the spotlight firmly back on Apple at a time when the iPhone 4 hadn't yet launched and the new Android phones at the time were getting a lot of tech world airtime.

Although part of the news is the fact Ruslan Kogan has said he isn't available for comment for the first time in living memory, the real point of Kogan's press release is to show Australians and the world that he is a man of honour and doesn't try to squirm out of mistakes as some other retailers have tried, at times, when their own sites have similarly snafubared themselves.

This is because a website bug, or snafu as I've termed it, which occurred this morning at Kogan's Australian site.

Kogan's press release notes that: 'Shoppers were able to incorrectly use several promotions in conjunction, with a $30 voucher being combined with today's storewide free shipping resulting in over 500 orders of the Kogan Set Top Box and Personal Video Recorder for only $9 delivered, in addition to hundreds of other items.

'The loophole went viral after being posted on OzBargain at 9.15am'.

The snafu sounds similar to one used last weekend in the US where some consumers were successfully, although incorrectly, using two $100 discount coupons to take $200 off the price of an HP TouchPad, instead of only the maximum $100 discount.

Ruslan Kogan specifically stated that:

'This was a bug that we were unable to plug until 10:39am, resulting in hundreds of Kogan products being sold at well below cost price.

'We know we could hide behind our terms and conditions to get out of having to honour these transactions. Indeed, this is what many of our competitors have done in the past.

'But, we believe the bug in our website was entirely our responsibility and as a result will be honouring every single purchase made this morning at a significiant cost to our business.'

Kogan's media release ends with the silence-inducing bombshell that 'Ruslan Kogan is not available for further comment'.

So'¦ if you were one of the lucky ones to get a super cheap Kogan STB and PVR, let's hope you're happy with it and, if so, tell your friends about it, so that Kogan's act of goodwill in honouring the site stuff up is 'paid forward' appropriately!