Adorama Knows Customer Service

Last year, Adorama had a nice sale on a Canon D480 printer. It was clearly a price mistake due to false advertisement of overlapping rebates. I wasn’t in the market for a printer and I had no intention of keeping it even if I had actually gotten it, but I decided to jump on it anyway. It turns out that my order went through, except it got cancelled a few days later due to the mix up.

Here’s an excerpt from the email I received on July 1, 2010:

Our recent cancellation of Canon printer and fax orders has generated a lot of chatter, some of it negative. It’s a rare day when one can buy a $250 Canon printer or fax for $25 using two different rebates – it’s so rare in fact that it wasn’t actually valid.

We take full responsibility for this confusion and offer our profound apologies. We want to be very clear that this incident was simply a regrettable misunderstanding and an honest human failure. In no way was it due to dishonesty or any attempt to deceive our customers.

If Adorama had communicated this better-than-ever, Canon double rebate offer, you can be sure that we would honor it. We would have been fully stocked and ready to accept the incredible number of orders. In this case, the offer was unauthorized and thus we had only a tiny fraction of the inventory needed.

Rebates are common, in both instant and mail-in forms, but use of both rebates on one item is extremely unusual. It was certainly our fault for not making this policy loud and clear in the first place. As it was, it was not Adorama, but a third party that pieced together this erroneous deal and alerted the public.

Adorama has indeed in the past offered great, amazing and even ridiculous deals – so we applaud your zeal in jumping on it – in this case, it simply wasn’t valid.

To all who have been affected by this confusion, we sincerely apologize with both words and a complimentary $25 Adorama gift card.

Here are a few things Adorama accomplished through this email and gesture:

1. They owned up to their mistake. Not a lot of companies would do that. Instead, they could have quoted some legal jargon that allows them to weasel out of price mistakes or that the mistake was a 3rd party and not theirs. But they didn’t. Not only did they admit fault, they took responsibility right away.
2. They put their words into action by offering each cancelled order a $25 credit to their store. That’s going above and beyond. It’s also genius because it increases the probability of that person going to the store to buy something. Yeah, they got a $25 discount, but most likely they’re going to spend a little over that and end up moving inventory. Nice move.
3. They created buzz and customer loyalty. At the time these emails went out, everyone who received them told someone they knew or posted it on a forum or blog. The word spread and increased awareness of Adorama. It also showed good will on behalf of the company that is highly likely to generate business it might not have gotten otherwise.

Needless to say, I was quite pleased with getting a $25 gift card for basically submitting an online order that I knew would get cancelled anyway. However, I never had a chance to use it until recently. Now that the baby is coming soon, I needed to power all the devices, gadgets, and toys that will be introduced into the home. So I finally found a use for the gift card and I decided to purchase 16 Rayovac rechargeable AA batteries.

Sure, I get it. In and of itself, it’s not that exciting. But after applying my free gift card, it came out to $2.96! That’s 18.5 cents each and definitely something that gets me excited!  And you know what?  My baby is going to appreciate it more than you or I will ever know.