Disaster recovery in the internet age

It used to be the case that you could make a mistake in any walk of life and it would go largely unnoticed. Not so in the internet age.

Today we reported on how a quarter of email users live in fear of mistakenly sending a personal email to their boss, while a third lose sleep over the details of a personal email being shared with a wider audience. There are famous precedents for both - most notably Claire Swire whose infamous and very saucy email to her boyfriend was shared with the world.

These mishaps are tragic for the individuals involved and the consequences can be severe, ranging from utter humiliation to career-ending disciplinary action.

More serious, however, is when these howlers occur on a corporate level in clear view of millions. This week it was the turn of Amazon.co.uk. The e-tail giant has been in the news for all the wrong reasons after a pricing blunder on its website offered an HP iPaq for £7.32. Quite a discount when you consider the recommended retail price is closer to £300.

This is not the first mistake of its kind but it is by far the largest to date. Word of Amazon's mistake spread across the web like wildfire. Newsrooms, news services, emails between friends and message boards such a Popbitch all reported the error and consumers flocked onto the site to buy up the bargain basement-priced gadgets - leaving the ball sitting very awkwardly in Amazon's court.

The classic counter, as favoured by other e-tail sites, was the blanket refusal to honour the sale, hiding behind the small print of the sale agreement. But lawyers are having none of this, claiming the wording of Amazon's confirmation email is too ambiguous. While it's fair to say it's in their best interests to encourage litigation, some consumers don't need too much encouragement. Many are unimpressed with the e-tailer's actions and Amazon is left in a no-win no-man's-land.

If Amazon honours the sale - and this in incredibly unlikely - it will take a massive financial hit. The margins in the electronics trade can be good but they're not good enough for Amazon to consider this a worthwhile move, even if it would be a trade off against damaging press coverage.

So instead the company hides behind its Ts and Cs and loses the respect of customers - not to mention exposes itself to individual claims from shoppers not yet ready to surrender the bargain of the year. When Argos advertised £3 TVs on its website the fight over whether it should honour the offer ended in the courts. By the end of the case the catalogue giant may well have wished it had just coughed up and been done with the whole affair far earlier.

In truth, very few shoppers will have thought they had a realistic chance of getting their hands on the knock-down iPaqs - most accept they were being opportunistic - but such a schoolboy error does raise a few questions which Amazon has yet to answer.

After all, if you wanted to pay the retail price of £274 for an iPaq, wouldn't you like to think the people handling your considerable sum of money weren't prone to stupid mistakes of any kind?

So what is Amazon to do? Send silicon.com the iPaqs we ordered and hope it shuts us up? Sadly not. Amazon is a company we've long been fans of - and will back to thrive in the future - but whatever it does now it will raise criticism and damaging press. Amazon's brand is imbued with community spirit - the list pages and customers reviews blur the boundaries between customer and retailer. The free delivery at Christmas, discounts, vouchers and personalisation are seen as giving something back.

Wherever it goes from here, the events of this week will have soured that relationship. True, consumers reverted to type and tried to screw them over - especially those buying in bulk - and accordingly the site showed its true colours by digging its heels in and coldly hiding behind legal jargon.

Short of inventing a time machine Amazon should probably be hoping somebody else comes along and makes an even greater blunder. In truth, it shouldn't be too long.