Portable Planet

Last Friday for a brief period of time, Amazon made Nintendo Wii available for pre-order. Not unexpectedly, Amazon was flooded with pre-orders by the truckloads. Rather quickly, the online retailer stopped taking any more Wii pre-orders, and left quite a few consumers angry and/or puzzled.

Now Amazon has acknowledged the boo-boo and apologized for it. This, as we know all, is the first step towards healing. Personally, I’m still a little miffed that I missed out before I even knew they were for sale since I had signed up for notification. But deep in my heart, I know it’s not really Amazon’s fault. You snooze, you lose, as my homeroom teacher used to say before whacking me with a ruler.

Here’s the full text of the Amazon explanation:

Hi! My name is Jon, and I’m an editor working on the Amazon.com Video Games team. We know that everyone is excited to get their Wii pre-ordered… heck, we’re anxious, too. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have our launch allocation numbers from Nintendo, so we don’t have any hard and fast data for you.

For a brief period on Friday, we did offer pre-orders for the Wii, however, the rate at which pre-orders came in dramatically outpaced what we had anticipated, so we suspended pre-orders until we are able to get a firmer commitment from Nintendo regarding how many units we’ll have for sale.

Because the pre-order window was so brief, the e-mail many of you signed up for notifying you that pre-orders were available was never triggered to send out. We apologize and have fixed the system to ensure pre-order e-mail notifications are sent in advance.

In the meantime, there are several ways you can stay up to date on the latest Wii information:

Visit our Nintendo Wii page and sign up for e-mail updates
Visit our Video Games store: http://www.amazon.com/games
Visit our Video Games blog: http://www.amazon.com/vg-blog

We apologize for any confusion regarding the status of Wii pre-orders, but hope this clears some things up. If you have any questions or issues, Amazon.com Customer Service is always ready to assist you, and I’ll do my best to answer questions in this forum. Thanks!

- Jon G.
Editor, Video Games
Amazon.com