Amazon once sold a Rs 185 Surf Excel pack for Rs 82,740. Then it had to stop 90 deliveries

In 2015, an Excel spreadsheet error briefly turned a ₹185 pack of Surf Excel into an Rs 82,740 product on Amazon India. What was more surprising was that within 40 minutes, 90 customers had placed orders, creating nearly Rs 74 lakh worth of sales that the company then had to roll back. None of these reached the customers, however.

The incident was recalled by Anubhav N, Business Head at Amazon, in a LinkedIn post. According to Anubhav, at that time, Amazon had launched the household supplies and personal care category a few months earlier. Cloudtail, then one of Amazon India's largest sellers, was handling the products and their pricing.

"That evening, someone uploaded an Excel sheet where the date column slid into the price column. Excel, which has strong opinions about dates, quietly turned one into a number. So our humble Surf Excel, usually ₹185, went live at the price of a two-wheeler.

Normally a price like that scares everyone away.  The product, which normally sold for around Rs 185, went live at ₹82,740 at about 6pm, Anubhav wrote.

The unusually high price might ordinarily have been expected to prevent sales. Instead, the listing was circulated on Twitter, along with a suggestion that customers could buy the product, preserve their invoices, and approach a consumer court seeking compensation. As a result, he says, orders began pouring in.

"At 6:20 I was halfway through a samosa when a customer service agent called, sounding like the building was on fire. The next half hour went in finding what broke and fixing it. By then we had sold 90 packs at ₹82,740 each. That's ₹74 lakh of detergent in 40 minutes, easily the best evening my category ever had on paper. The harder task was reversing the orders," he wrote. 

While they did fix the price, the toughest part was to prevent these goods from reaching customers' homes. "Getting those 90 packs back took 12 hours, against a system built to do one thing brilliantly, which was to get stuff to customers fast. 55 orders hadn't reached the warehouse yet, so they got cancelled without much drama," Anubhav wrote. Another 15, according to him, had arrived at the warehouse and required multiple levels of managerial approval before they could be stopped. Twelve had already been packed and were ready for dispatch. Anubhav said he had to wake his category director at 1am to obtain approval to stop those shipments.

Eight had already left for morning delivery, requiring approval from Amazon's country head to intercept them. Two more packs were already with delivery personnel preparing to begin their delivery routes. Amazon's operations team eventually tracked down the two delivery personnel and asked them not to deliver the products.

For Anubhav, the incident had a more personal consequence. He said the experience made him stop trusting Excel with dates. He also recalled that it was the only time during his tenure at Amazon when he was praised for ensuring that products did not get delivered.