Razer will be honoring the bulk of the purchases made earlier this week by consumers using an unauthorized promo code. Even though these discounts took 90 percent off the standard price for the company’s high-quality gaming peripherals, CEO Min-Liang Tan confirmed that people will get the goods that they paid for.
It was Razer's online store in the U.K. that was allowing users to input a code that slashed the price of its products, but it was only recently that the company actually knew why this was happening. Polygon was first to contact the company for comment, and today, Tan took to Facebook to clear up the situation.
“A few days ago, a coupon code that provided a discount of 90 percent off Razer products at our U.K. 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),” the statement reads. “When we discovered this, we had to shut down our site for a bit until we figured out what was going on.”
Although Razer has the right to cancel all of these orders, Tan has decided to go through with the process and take the financial hit on the chin.
“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,” Tan continued. “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.”
Those who bought in bulk will only be able to apply the discount on a single item. Due to high demand, the process of shipping all the gear out to consumers is expected to take a little over a month.
This will be a costly problem on Razer’s part, but that doesn’t mean all’s bad for the gaming group. Both the world’s most powerful gaming tablet and a line of left-handed mice should help draw some positive buzz for Razer in 2013.
