Unbelievable underhand Crucial.com sales tactics!

[gunpowda]

So, I was just about to order 2gb of RAM for my Macbook. The product was in my cart, I was entering my credit card number.

A special offer got added to my cart too: if you spend a certain amount on a certain type of RAM, they throw in a free SD card too. Cool.

I clicked submit, and the site went down with no response.

I refreshed, and got a site maintenance message.

10 minutes later the site was back up, and they'd raised the price on that exact kind of RAM by £3! Also, the free 1gb SD card offer was nowhere to be seen.

I tried an online proxy and got the old price. But obviously I wasn't going to submit my credit card details through a proxy server. Crucial's sudden changing in pricing and offers is ridiculous. I've e-mailed them to let them know what happened: let's see what they say.

 

[spicyapple]

Crazy Crucial Prices!
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/218162/

I haven't bought anything from them in a while but it seems they are still up to their old tactics.

 

[gunpowda]

Well, that sucks. I read the threads and note that no one ever got a reply from Crucial about it. I wonder if they'll ignore me.

 

[princealfie]

Wny not just use ebay?

 

[SC68Cal]

Crazy Crucial Prices!
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/218162/

I haven't bought anything from them in a while but it seems they are still up to their old tactics.

I remember that! I never bought ram from them, and never will.

Unless I get a Cost Center ID# from the university

 

[Keebler]

that's brutal.

i bought ram for my g5 before and now i wonder if i was ripped off. the service and shipping was great, but i don't like inconsistent pricing issues.

i wonder if any crucial employee has seen both threads on their pricing. it has to hurt them when diehard mac folks like us keep seeing the tactics.

brutal.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Well, the dynamic pricing issue aside, don't hang Crucial for the limitations of the technology.

Anyone who is online at midnight Idaho time (or whatever time they choose to update the servers) when the servers are taken down to update the pricing, their unfinished carts run the risk of being repriced. This is true of most online shopping databases; price changes are made periodically and there will always be someone who looks at a price now and its different 10 minutes later. A 24/7 no-downtime system would be possible to design but much more expensive.

Remember that the Web is stateless -- it doesn't 'remember' what it wrote to your screen 10 minutes ago. A shopping cart order doesn't exist until it is submitted and accepted - a shopper may have added something to the cart 30 minutes earlier, it 'looks' like it's real, but its only an entry in a cookie or in a temp file until the order is committed. Anytime up until then, the relational data is subject to change. I was trying to order some clearance stock items from FutureShop, and by the time I had loaded the cart and gone to checkout, they were out of stock, I went back and chose something else, went to check out and two more items had sold out in the meantime.

So this may be a case of dynamic pricing, but not necessarily. Crucial should take the opportunity to correct your particular situation manually.

 

[AlBDamned]

So, I was just about to order 2gb of RAM for my Macbook. The product was in my cart, I was entering my credit card number.

A special offer got added to my cart too: if you spend a certain amount on a certain type of RAM, they throw in a free SD card too. Cool.

I clicked submit, and the site went down with no response.

I refreshed, and got a site maintenance message.

10 minutes later the site was back up, and they'd raised the price on that exact kind of RAM by £3! Also, the free 1gb SD card offer was nowhere to be seen.

I tried an online proxy and got the old price. But obviously I wasn't going to submit my credit card details through a proxy server. Crucial's sudden changing in pricing and offers is ridiculous. I've e-mailed them to let them know what happened: let's see what they say.

Did you get that offer via e-mail or was it direct on the site?

 

[isleofjib]

Well, the dynamic pricing issue aside, don't hang Crucial for the limitations of the technology.

Anyone who is online at midnight Idaho time (or whatever time they choose to update the servers) when the servers are taken down to update the pricing, their unfinished carts run the risk of being repriced. This is true of most online shopping databases; price changes are made periodically and there will always be someone who looks at a price now and its different 10 minutes later. A 24/7 no-downtime system would be possible to design but much more expensive.

Remember that the Web is stateless -- it doesn't 'remember' what it wrote to your screen 10 minutes ago. A shopping cart order doesn't exist until it is submitted and accepted - a shopper may have added something to the cart 30 minutes earlier, it 'looks' like it's real, but its only an entry in a cookie or in a temp file until the order is committed. Anytime up until then, the relational data is subject to change. I was trying to order some clearance stock items from FutureShop, and by the time I had loaded the cart and gone to checkout, they were out of stock, I went back and chose something else, went to check out and two more items had sold out in the meantime.

So this may be a case of dynamic pricing, but not necessarily. Crucial should take the opportunity to correct your particular situation manually.

except, he says after that he went back to the site using a proxy and the price then showed the lower price. this sounds very fishy to me. if it was just a pricing update, then the proxy would show the new, updated, price, shouldn't it?

 

[gunpowda]

Postscript: I checked the store today, and the RAM was about £10 cheaper.

I've placed my order - if they're going to vary pricing so much it should at least work in my favour.

 

[Abstract]

Dynamic pricing IS a scam, and I won't buy from them or recommend them again.


Changing their prices isn't a tactic of theirs. They do this, as do other store. Besides, how is changing their prices a "ripoff"? It's only considered a "ripoff" to you because you saw the cheaper price first.

If your life was different, and you had originally waited 5 extra minutes before going online to Crucial's website to purchase RAM, you would have seen the more expensive price and never known that the price 5 minutes ago was cheaper by £3. Would you still have considered the price to be a ripoff, or would you have waited for Crucial to put the RAM on sale for £3 off?

 

[gunpowda]

You're right, it's not a rip-off as such - you're probably paying less than you would on eBay, with a better guarantee - and sure, if I'd only seen one price there would have been no issue.

But the fact that they vary prices within minutes (and almost randomly, based on your cookies, according to the other thread) doesn't seem fair on the consumer.

I have no complaints about their products, I just find it hard to believe that their pricing fluctuates at stock market levels.