/Putting tin foil hat on (in light of eBay and Target fiascos).
Maybe they got hacked and hackers changed the price to crate a honeypot. Then spread some links on HN, Reddit, Facebook. Presented it as an "error" on the part of Lenovo. Then everyone goes to the site, puts in their credit card number and billing address they've got a nice, database within a matter of hours.
What a letdown, tried to buy two and realized that it was Canadian only. I was trying to hack around and see if I could get the site to accept US address info by forcing it past the JS validation and the item expired while in my cart. Seems it was a price mistake and they found out about it.
Most likely not a PR stunt gone wrong, but a pricing error on the website. Those who ordered will probably get an email stating that their order has been canceled and they'll be refunded their money.
Years ago a coworker had figured out the timing of Dell's web store updates. He would go on moments after the update and search for pricing mistakes, which seemed to happen with surprising frequency. Dell (at the time, anyway) would honor orders that were placed before the prices were corrected.
> I can confirm that they definitely sold one today
Interesting way of putting it. How can you confirm? Do you work for them or know someone how bought one?
The deal seems to be for Canada geographic region. It tried to see how far it would go with checkout (expecting an error at some point) but at the checkout page only Canadian addresses are accepted.
Just tried ordering and it would only accept Canadian addresses. Went to the US version of the site and the laptop is $789. Got me excited there for a minute!
I mean, who wants to buy a high performance laptop such as this that is 14 inches when there is a 15.6 inch model. They're probably massively overstocked.
Lenovo reserves the right to refuse to sell a product to any customer for any reason, or to limit the number of units to a particular product that a customer may buy at any one time. If we do not accept your order we will notify you by phone or email; your credit card payment will not be processed or your direct deposit will be refunded.
I don't understand why they won't just take the loss - it seems like it'd be worth the good PR 10x over.