I don't think we really can do anything meaningful.

All I hear is that people are just complaining. I was also a victim, my question to everyone: Is there anything that the community (folks who stayed up late in order to get this non existent deal) can do which can make this right? Or is Dell such a large corporation that we small individuals don't matter? I have heard that consumer makes or break a company, however, folks it looks like we don't stand a chance and the mighty and biggest will win. Bad business dell very bad business! Don't do this to general public please, its very hurtful!

From the thread it seems like I was not even given an option of $299 price for 15". Can't believe it. Bad business, very bad!

Hi Lorna,

Thank you for responding to this thread. Since you are from SOS and apparently our liason (clean up duty?), could you answer/address some questions/issues?

I think we all understand that this deal was "limited quantity", but we find hard it to believe (although acknowledge that is possible) is that your system/site may have been broken enough to allow thousands of these to be sold over what was available. What I also do not understand, and perhaps you can address, is how Dell's inventory/order fulfillment system takes 4 days to evaluate the stock and notify customers of the "oversold" situation. It seems as if this was clearly intentional, as others have mentioned, just so customers would not take advantage of your competitor's Black Friday deals.  What are you comments on this?  Also understand that since "Dell" is associated with technology it looks EXTREMELY bad when your own internal systems are faulty.  I would be more understanding if this happened to a mom-and-pop online pet shop, but I do not expect this from a large technology company. 

Also, how can Dell automatically create an order for us and force us to call to cancel it?  You should have made the offer and made us call or go online to accept it--NOT force it upon us and make us wait hours to cancel it (since you can't cancel online).  It seems that Dell was hoping that some customers wouldn't see the email and/or some customers would give up trying to call and cancel.

I understand that Dell reserves the right to substitute an equivalent item in the case where the item is discontinued or unavailable but first and foremost, a 15-inch laptop is NOT equivalent to a 14-inch laptop and Windows 8 is not Windows 7.   If Dell was offering a truly equivalent system, I could see how you could automatically make a new order for me, but this is NOT what you guys did.

Go to your own e-commerce site and search for laptops (http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops.aspx?ref=usen-lt-tile). The first two filters are Screen Size and Operating System. Most consumers use those two attributes to determine which laptop to purchase. I'm sure your site has been optimized for customer shopping (unless you are saying that your UX people don't know what they are doing but I find that hard to believe), so how is the Inspiron 15 equivalent? It is only the same in processor, RAM, and hard-drive (#4, #7, and #8 in the filter list respectively). If these were the main deciding factors (they are important factors, but obviously less important than Screen Size and OS), then why aren't those the first filters?  

So now let's look at all of Dell's own shopping filters (in order as they appear on your site which implies importance unless you believe you have a horribly designed site) what we ordered versus what you tried to force upon us :

Oh and I guess the two laptops were also the same in graphics (because the graphics is attached to the processor) and the fact they are both from the "Inspiron" brand.  Anyway, this does not even to mention the other differences--this just points out the differences based on Dell's own shopping filters on Dell's website!

Given these drastic differences in product (the 14z we ordered and 15  we did NOT order), the bottom line is basically, Dell did try to pull bait-and-switch. Maybe that wasn't the original intention, maybe it was. BUT that was the end result. And honestly, creating orders for customers without the customer's permission is WAY out of line. It is credit card fraud. I suggest to all users that if you have a Dell account, delete your credit card information from it so that they don't create new orders for you later and charge your credit card for them.

Lorna, I would interested to hear you comment as to why Dell decided to create orders for everyone for a totally different machine? What was the reasoning from Dell's perspective?  We all speculate that you just wanted to get rid of your Inspiron 15's.  Please take this opportunity to defend Dell/justify the business decisions Dell has made.

Also could you address the seemingly arbitrary shipment of 14z's (some customer did get their orders shipped)? Did Dell decide to randomly choose customers who would get them? It does not seem like it was FIFO (first-in-first-out) since as others have mentioned, some customers who ordered 2 hours after the sale started have gotten them, while other customers who ordered within the 1st hour did not.

Thanks.

P.S. I find it hilarious for some reason that Social Outreach Services does come out to SOS!  Very clever...

I am among the ones affected, financially but even more than that mentally because of being cheated and harassed by this. Its been 2-3 days hearing all this and I can't believe someone can do such a thing. So now the world knows, this is a.They won't even hesitate to rob you on a Thanksgiving Weekend Sale and spoiling your holidays.I placed an order for a DELL Inspiron 14Z on 11/23/2012 during their 'so called' DELL 2012 Thanksgiving Sale (DELL, This is a very nice thanksgiving deal (or in fact deed) for holidays, Customers will make sure that we thank you for the deal in some similar way).Yesterday I received mail from us_dell_notify@dell.com stating my order for DELL Inspiron 14Z was delayed and will be delivered by 12/13/2012 instead of 11/29/2012. I was pretty OKAY with that as I could have managed for a few more days However as a good customer and being unknown to their tactics, I called DELL customer care in the morning at 10 AM to confirm & for my acceptance about this delay.It was my mistake. The DELL so called 'Professional' must be delighted that he got someone whose order he could cancel as I heard later that they are sending cancellation mails and making calls to customers from their end and forcing customers to either cancel the order OR change it to a relatively less worth computer (Inspiron 15).He asked to place me on hold for a minute or two. After putting me on hold for 5 minutes, he hanged up the call abruptly (Probably after cancelling the order and not informing me).My order was in ‘In production' Status. He cancelled the order and created new order of Inspiron 15 without my knowledge.It was only after getting dropped from call and surprised by this deed, I logged in to my account that I found that the Inspiron 14Z order for which I called was cancelled!!!... Hoo, what was that?So I tried to call on the Customer care number thrice after this incident with more than 1.5 hour of wait each time. They do not have the call back facility so I had to hear their irritating music for more than 4 hours in total.The customer care representatives heard my case and disconnected the calls 2 more times!!Further I tried to chat with these guys as they were dropping the calls on my face. A customer support representative in order support chat mentioned that the product is out of stock. When I told him that I can see Inspiron 14Z is available online. He asked me to reorder the Inspiron 14Z from DELL website at the present cost $599.99 with a $100 rebate stating that the promotion is no longer available now.  I told him repeatedly that I ordered at a time when the promotion was available and my order processing was COMPLETE. My order was 'In Production' status and that it was delayed. That I have already got the promotion offer $299.99 so How can you cancel my order and force me to take something inferior OR ask for placing order again at market price?He suddenly exited from the chat without bothering to answer my queries.Moreover,The biggest thing to be noted in this is that DELL sent mails after Cyber Monday. Does it take 4 days to find out that you oversold a particular item and that too in such a big number than all the blogs all over are full of you honesty stories? It really takes 4 days to do basic subtraction to a company which boasts to be leader in computer sales. They waited to get the entire Thanksgiving weekend and cyber Monday to get over so that people cannot go to their competitors and they can sell their later (DELL Inspiron15 i.e. larger, heavier, older USB ports budget 15-inch laptop I could buy some place else for $200) and they may have been successful in this tactic to some extent.If they had oversold, they should have told me that on the next day itself. If they failed to do so many things OR have such inefficient staff/software, they should bear the price of that not me.Here is a statement from, Executive Director DELL. This is dated November 27th, 2012 and I got from . The Link is:It says"Hi everyone. As you know, we experienced overwhelming demand to our Black Friday door buster deal for the Inspiron 14z laptop which resulted in our selling out of this model within minutes.And unfortunately, some issues on our site allowed for the system to be oversold. The teams worked quickly to fix the problems, and we didn’t see any issues with the Dell.com rolling deals that  followed the rest of the weekend and Cyber Monday."It clearly says that DELL found out the issue on Thursday itself. But they did not send mails to customers till whole Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday got over. WHY?There cannot be a bigger proof of this than the post above.The deal was for 12:00- 3:00 time frame in the midnight on 11/23 stating until stock lasts. After completing my order around 12:45 AM,I had checked again around 2:00 AM to see whether they still had stock and I was getting ' We're sorry, but we are unable to process your request. The product or offer you are attempting to locate is no longer available.' message so It means that the offer of Inspiron 14Z didn't run for the whole 12:00-3:00 time frame. There was a check of the number of items in 12:00 - 3:00 time frame also. If not, How they were able to display above message to users ?Today I got a call from their corporate office and a lady told that she wanted to learn about my complaint and help me. When I asked her certain questions like1. If you learnt that it was oversold why didn't you send the mail next day itself and why did you wait till whole Thanksgiving weekend gets over? She replied, she is not in a position to answer that.2. I asked her whose fault is it that it was oversold? She said that she cannot comment on that.So it was all together a diplomatic phone call with NO OUTCOME and she told me that my complaint in DELL will end with her as she was from corporate office.I informed her that it may end in DELL corporate office but not everywhere as we have other options open.If DELL was a good/ethical company with some basic moral values and honesty towards the customers, they would have humbly accepted the mistake (If ever it was a mistake which I highly doubt) and provided Inspiron 14Z (Either old model or New) to all people who bought that day rather than everyone and imposing their fault on customers.I am sure 100,200 $ do not make much difference to anyone out here who is impacted by this but the credibility of a company does matter. More than the financial loss to any one out here it is the pain and harassment everyone had to go through. What is 100$ discount???... Its available everywhere on every laptop so why should everyone clear theirfor the $100 discount.No one needs the Inspiron 15 when their requirement was 14" laptop.I want to resolve this issue with DELL before taking this with  in Round Rock, Texas and and other forums but surely, I am NOT GONNA let them go. The media is going to start to kick in, and then Dell is going to start to sweat. Let's see where this trick takes them.These people spoiled my holidays, We don't live in silo where any one can do anything and get away. This is a connected world. I will make sure that I put this in front of everyone in US and abroad in very possible way so as to let everyone know what DELL is. I am  NOT going to buy anything again from this company.I guess the company is going down the drain and they don't care about reputation anymore. As the saying goes, "Dead pigs are not afraid of being soaked in boiling water".. This is NOT acceptable.

I successfully placed my order a few minutes after 12:00 am Friday, 11/23/2012.  I received an e-mail that my order was confirmed at 12:20 am Friday, 11/23/2012.  I never received an e-mail telling me that Dell switched the order from the Inspiron 14z to the Inspiron 15.  I found out the switch was made by checking my status and noticed it read "Changed".  With no explaination as to what "Changed" meant, I decided to search by my Customer Number and Zip Code.  This is when I noticed a second order for the Inspiron 15.So Dell wants me to believe that after confirming my order (20 minutes after the sale started) it apparently ran out of the Inspiron 14z.Also, instead of asking me if I wanted the Inspiron 15 as a replacement they just  assumed I would and placed the order.Why does a successful company such as Dell have to stoop to such lows in order to make a few more bucks?

Same experience. Waited 2 hours to check out, got the email days later saying the order will be changed. Called customer support several times and waited for hours couldn't get through. Sent email to customer support and got no reply. This is "the most terrible experience". Dell's solution is simply not acceptable! You are treating your customers like idiots and dumpsters. 

Word got to the media now

Great.

These people should come to know what it is to play with customers emotions with these dirty tricks.

So, you got negative 50% discount.   lol. 

Greatness. I do have one question for the members here. Since some of you good folks were promised (eventhough an inferior product) for $299 where as I was provided with option of buying the same 15" for $499  ($200) more than it was offered to folks what tactics would that qualify as? Take advantage of people(financially) as much as company can?

I believe Inspiron 15 is over sold . LOL......:emotion-4:

I don't think so, otherwise Dell will provide Inspiron 16 instead of increase price.  LOL..

Great. These people should come to know what it is to play with customers emotions with these dirty tricks. I have contacted the asian news channels and tabloids. I will make sure I pass this word everywhere.

let us know when gets to the asian news channels