One point I haven't seen anyone discuss yet in the comments below: the author mentions that, after seeing that the phone was sold out, he kept refreshing the browser till he got a copy of the webpage that allowed him to buy the phone.
I'm wondering if perhaps that copy of the webpage was an out-of-date cached page from a server that hadn't been updated recently enough (or that the page was created based on a copy of data in a cache that hadn't been updated recently enough) and that buying from such a page somehow led to a phantom purchase being created -- since there were no actual phones left to buy -- which got pushed through the system to the point of creating a UPS record for a non-existent phone.
Obviously, one would hope an ecommerce system would catch issues like that so spurious purchases would not be allowed through in the end, but -- in any case -- should the buyer perhaps have realized (in retrospect, at least, if not at the time) that there might be a problem if all his previous attempts to load the webpage were telling him the phone was sold out?
There were thousands like him, and we were (within a day or two) told that our orders were actually pre-orders, and we were given specific delivery timeframes (2-4 weeks, 3-4 weeks... 8-9 weeks)
At any time after this point, one could simply cancel their orders. Many did so.
Once it was realised that orders weren't being shipping in order of placement, many placed new orders (canceling the second once one was delivered).
Folks here are making this out to be par for the course, but this was a very specific messup, and shouldn't be taken as the usual Google Play purchase experience. Google and/or LG severely underestimated how popular the phone would be, and that was their biggest mistake.
Why should a user "know" they got a cached page and not that more phones came up for sale? How could you possibly spin this as somehow being the users fault for not "knowing"?
Perhaps because I've had my own odd experiences with online and offline commerce, as well as having read about others' on FatWallet.com, I may tend to see red flags where others don't.
For example, in my experience, online inventory doesn't typically get updated very quickly. So, seeing inventory suddenly show up for a sold-out item as I was rapidly refreshing, I think, might trigger my spidey-sense but perhaps other people might not think this way.
In any case, my comments aren't meant to excuse any poor customer service, or any other issues, on the vendor's end and I hope the author's case is resolved to his satisfaction.
I'm wondering if perhaps that copy of the webpage was an out-of-date cached page from a server that hadn't been updated recently enough (or that the page was created based on a copy of data in a cache that hadn't been updated recently enough) and that buying from such a page somehow led to a phantom purchase being created -- since there were no actual phones left to buy -- which got pushed through the system to the point of creating a UPS record for a non-existent phone.
Obviously, one would hope an ecommerce system would catch issues like that so spurious purchases would not be allowed through in the end, but -- in any case -- should the buyer perhaps have realized (in retrospect, at least, if not at the time) that there might be a problem if all his previous attempts to load the webpage were telling him the phone was sold out?