Lenovo pays for tablet's online price slipup

China's Lenovo Group, the world's largest personal computer vendor by shipment, said it will honor the sales of 110,000 units of tablets it sold under a significantly lowered erroneous price, a move that will cost the company 100 million yuan ($16.13 million), the Beijing News reported on Wednesday.

The price of Lenovo's S5000 Android tablet computer (3G model) was mistakenly reduced from 1,888 yuan to 999 yuan, a fall of nearly 50 percent, during a backstage upgrade by Lenovo's online store in the earlier hours of Tuesday.

Leading Chinese e-commerce company jd.com found the big price cut Tuesday morning and swiftly orchestrated a sales campaign centered on the product.

Before noon, all the S5000 tablets available on the jd.com sales channel had been sold out, with over 100,000 units bought by consumers.

Lenovo said the product's low price was wrongly listed and it was probing what caused the internal mistake.

Chen Xudong, vice president of Lenovo China, wrote on his Sina Weibo on Tuesday that he acknowledged this as a mistake caused by Lenovo staff but said both Lenovo and jd.com will honor the orders that have already been placed by customers.

Consumers said they are satisfied with Lenovo's statement, while insisting at the same time that Lenovo has no right to cancel orders that had already been confirmed by the seller.

Lenovo's online shopping site made a similar mistake in 2008 in the US, when the price of the ThinkPadT61 notebook was marked as $224, whereas the actual price should have been $1,700.

Lenovo's US branch handled the mistake by issuing a statement to customers and canceled all the orders, citing an "unexpected mistake."

The company did not provide any compensation.

However, Lenovo is not the only online shopping platform that has misstated the price tag for one of its products.

Business-to-consumer e-commerce platform dangdang.com and jd.com have also made similar mistakes in the past.