Amazon Apologizes For Sales Ranking Glitch

Posted on April 14, 2009

Amazon.com has apologized for an error that cause many books to lose their sale rankings. Many blogs reported that only gay and lesbian titles books lost their sales rankings but Amazon.com claims that's not the case. Amazon.com says 57,310 books lost their sales rank in a number of broad categories including Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Glitches spread around the Internet very quickly these days. News of the glitch and suggestions Amazon was intentionally targeting gay/lesbian titles spread around Twitter under the hashtag #amazonfail. Amazon was smart to post a response so quickly and defuse the situation. Seattlepi.com has a post here that explains what may have opened.