Personal curiosity: Do you still use Amazon? They do this behavior.
Clarification: It need not even be offline. Even if you are online, there is no way to tell if in the TimeToServer after you clicked the buy button that somebody else hasn't already clicked the buy button.
And you can't say this is trivially solved by a central master server that uses a "first come first serve" basis that then knows to report an error back to you after you clicked the button.
Why? Because the whole point of online shopping is that you might have customers on opposite sides of the nation or world. There is no guarantee they will hit the same server, or even if you sharded it so they will a single server can only physically scale up to so many requests.
So point being this IS NOT LYING, because suggesting I can communicate faster than light or predict the future is lying. As I believe the article mentioned, computers can only make their best guess. This isn't a lie, but yes they might make a mistake - and the best corrective action is to apologize and compensate.
It would be a far greater mistake to assume FTL knowledge, and a lie to think the machine can't sometimes fail and be wrong.
I've more often had the opposite experience with Amazon. They usually hit the early side of their delivery estimates.
Amazon manages my expectation correctly by saying "Only N left in stock" where that is appropriate. They have earned enough trust and applied this consistently well enough for me to believe they are saying this mostly for my benefit, rather than just to manipulate me into panic buying. Although I don't prefer to shop at Amazon, that's an impressive feat.
It is lying to make a blanket statement like "in stock" when you know there is a fair chance that it isn't.
The number of times when I will lose a "first come first serve" retail battle due to light speed should be infinitesimally small (or predicatable: ticket sales sites have developed a decent system for dealing with this). Even if this did happen, you could certainly recognise it before taking my money: you don't have to take my money at the speed of light. I don't believe this is the cause of any of the delivery/stock errors that I have experienced.
Compensating me by offering me money off my next purchase is not compensation: it's a shady marketing trick.
It is lying to make a blanket statement like "in stock" when you know there is a fair chance that it isn't.
Exactly. The CAP theorem isn't the customer's problem.
I do find it infuriating when a merchant tells me they have something in stock, takes my money, and then says they don't. The solution to this is easy enough for routine sales of off-the-shelf products: take the money at the time you physically ship the product to the customer. If you take an order in real time and then find you can't actually ship it within a short time after that order was placed then own up and offer the customer the best options you can.
A business that took my money for something they claimed was in stock but then didn't ship and held the money for a significant period would get a polite enquiry the first time, but if that didn't result in the product being shipped or an immediate full refund, they'd get the book thrown at them. This is probably the most common complaint I've heard among friends and family with on-line merchants as well, and as far as I can tell, pretty much everyone takes the same view about this one.
Compensating me by offering me money off my next purchase is not compensation: it's a shady marketing trick.
I agree with this, too. Taking someone's money and then failing to provide the goods is breach of contract, pure and simple. A merchant can certainly offer the customer some form of compensation for the inconvenience. If they have a generally good reputation with that customer and it's a rare event then maybe the gesture will help to maintain that positive relationship. But the customer has no obligation to accept the gesture, and if the merchant does this systematically, they deserve every chargeback they get.
>> It is lying to make a blanket statement like "in stock" when you know there is a fair chance that it isn't.
Well, hold on. They're not intentionally lying. They are allowing a condition where an inaccuracy could present itself, but is that lying? That is the last information that the system has. I suppose we could always use UX labeling that doesn't imply any commitment, i.e. "Reported in stock" or "In stock at last check" and that would be more strictly accurate. I wonder how users would react?
Clarification: It need not even be offline. Even if you are online, there is no way to tell if in the TimeToServer after you clicked the buy button that somebody else hasn't already clicked the buy button.
And you can't say this is trivially solved by a central master server that uses a "first come first serve" basis that then knows to report an error back to you after you clicked the button.
Why? Because the whole point of online shopping is that you might have customers on opposite sides of the nation or world. There is no guarantee they will hit the same server, or even if you sharded it so they will a single server can only physically scale up to so many requests.
So point being this IS NOT LYING, because suggesting I can communicate faster than light or predict the future is lying. As I believe the article mentioned, computers can only make their best guess. This isn't a lie, but yes they might make a mistake - and the best corrective action is to apologize and compensate.
It would be a far greater mistake to assume FTL knowledge, and a lie to think the machine can't sometimes fail and be wrong.