Best Buy oversight causes online order cancellations

By Jeff Hughes December 23, 2011

It seems like Best Buy may have grinched some of its customers right before the holidays. The company has announced that it has not been able to keep up with the shopping demand and won’t be fulfilling some customers’ orders.

“Due to overwhelming demond of hot product offerings on BestBuy.com druing the November and December time period, we have encountered a situation that has affected redemption of some of our customers’ online orders,” the electronics retailer stated earlier this week. “We are very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused and we have notified the affected customers.”

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Best Buy hasn’t released real information on how many customers were affected, or which items happened to be out of stock, but the company does say that apparently only one percent of orders were affected. The WSJ points out that electronics retailer was not prepared for the onslaught of online customers over Thanksgiving weekend. Customers recently received notices that their orders had been canceled.

Best Buy’s online forums have been swamped with an army of angry customers complaining in response to the mishandling of their orders. Some customers felt cheated and scammed, some cried fraud while others claimed they would take their business to Amazon in the future. As far as rectifying beyond the stated apology, some customers have reportedly received giftcards as well as their promised orders; however this doesn’t seem like the company’s across-the-board response yet.

Though the Wall Street Journal points out that this snafu may not have hurt Best Buy’s holiday sales this year, it may be detrimental to Best Buy’s campaign to chase after Amazon. The electronics retailer has been ramping up its online offerings and cutting back on its big box stores in order to compete better with online retailers.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

I'm a SF Bay Area-based writer/ninja that loves anything geek, tech, comic, social media or gaming-related.

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