Adam happened to see the stand mixer of his dreams listed on Amazon for only $36. That was quite a discount from the list price of $500, even with $76.76 shipping, so he jumped on it. As you can guess, this deal wasn’t real and the Amazon Marketplace vendor certainly hadn’t meant to offer a 93% off sale. The seller canceled the transaction, claiming to have no inventory. Now Adam has no mixer, is sad, and blames Amazon. Is this really Amazon’s fault?

I bought a badass Kitchenaid mixer from a 3rd party seller on Amazon last night for $36. Too good to be true? Probably but I went ahead and purchased the mixer. I got email confirmation of the completed sale.

A couple of hours later the sale was cancelled with no explanation. Long story short, once the seller saw the price I had paid, he cancelled the sale. I talked to amazon customer service, but they refused to match the price and sell me the mixer directly. I emailed the seller and got a response saying that the item is out of stock. A quick search on amazon finds that the seller is not out of stock and is still selling the mixer at a corrected price.

I get that people make pricing mistakes sometimes, but when I find a great deal on friggin AMAZON.COM, the biggest online retailer in the world, I expect that deal to be honored. Luckily I had the foresight to take a screenshot of the listing before I made my purchase.

Amazon sucks.

Amazon may be the biggest online retailer in the solar system, but that third-party seller could just be a random person with some mixers in her garage who missed a decimal point while listing new inventory.

That’s no excuse to lie to customers: the seller clearly assumes that Adam wasn’t going to go check and see whether there were still any mixers on the selller’s virtual shelves.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.