Two weeks ago, an article appeared on CNN about a bookseller on Amazon who had a book valued at $3.99 listed at $23,698,655.93 USD – plus shipping. The book, “The Making of a Fly” was nothing special – it wasn’t even autographed. How then, did the seller think it was worth $23 million? He didn’t. The actual cause of the ridiculous price was an improperly configured “pricing robot;” a tool many online retailers use to help set the price of items they are selling based on competitors prices. What happened, was that two different sellers of the book had misconfigured pricing robots that had no ceiling price set – so the two battled each other over the period of a few weeks until reaching comical levels. Read the full story over at CNN.

This is a great example of why businesses and retailers need a partner like Sand Dollar Studios who can help you avoid mistakes like this.