Earlier this week, a coupon "generated by a third party to test our shopping cart" was made available on peripheral company Razer's UK store. That coupon offered 90% off products at the store.
As you can guess, people swooped on it.
Because the coupon was - according to Razer USA boss Min-Liang Tan - "NOT authorized nor approved by Razer", the company had the right to cancel all orders made. They will be, after all, taking a substantial financial hit on just about every product sold at that price.
In a nice touch, though, all single orders made using the coupon will be honoured. And all orders asking for multiple units of the same item will also get the chance to buy one of them at 90% off. Those asking for a ton of everything - is, resellers out for a quick bargain - are being afforded no such luxury.
Tan says that the backlog will take a few months to clear, so the orders might take a while, but hey, for 90% off, you can wait.
Tan's full statement is below.
A few days ago, a coupon code that provided a discount of 90% off Razer products at our UK Razerzone store went viral and thousands of orders were placed in the space of a couple of hours. This coupon code was NOT authorized nor approved by Razer and was generated by a third party to test our shopping cart (and left in our system unknown to us till now). When we discovered this, we had to shut down our site for a bit until we figured out what was going on.
While we have the option of cancelling the orders legally, we’ve always had a customer comes first policy at Razer and in respect of this incident, we have decided to honor the orders that were placed using the unauthorized code by Razer fans buying single products for their own use. Unfortunately, as the products are being sold well below their cost, it will likely cost us an insane amount of losses to make good on the orders which will really really hurt us as we’re still a small company - that much said, we want to do right by the community. For orders in the multiples of units for a single product, we will still give each an opportunity to purchase one item of each product ordered at the 90% off discount but not for multiple units of the same product. Our focus is on doing the right thing for our fans, the gamers and the community, not for resellers or users to profit from this. That’s not gaming, that’s not our deal.
So that’s the plan. It’s going to take a few weeks (and up to a few months in certain cases) to get all these orders processed and shipped—a lot of stuff was already back-ordered due to high demand—and we ask that customers please bear with us. We apologize to anyone miffed or confused by this week’s happenings in the U.K., we appreciate everyone’s patience, and we thank all of our customers for their support. Game on…