In 2015, an Excel spreadsheet error briefly turned a ₹185 pack of Surf Excel into an Rs 82,740 product on Amazon India. What was more surprising was that within 40 minutes, 90 customers had placed orders, creating nearly Rs 74 lakh worth of sales that the company then had to roll back. None of these reached the customers, however.

The incident was recalled by Anubhav N, Business Head at Amazon, in a LinkedIn post. According to Anubhav, at that time, Amazon had launched the household supplies and personal care category a few months earlier. Cloudtail, then one of Amazon India's largest sellers, was handling the products and their pricing.

"That evening, someone uploaded an Excel sheet where the date column slid into the price column. Excel, which has strong opinions about dates, quietly turned one into a number. So our humble Surf Excel, usually ₹185, went live at the price of a two-wheeler.

Normally a price like that scares everyone away.  The product, which normally sold for around Rs 185, went live at ₹82,740 at about 6pm, Anubhav wrote.

The unusually high price might ordinarily have been expected to prevent sales. Instead, the listing was circulated on Twitter, along with a suggestion that customers could buy the product, preserve their invoices, and approach a consumer court seeking compensation. As a result, he says, orders began pouring in.

"At 6:20 I was halfway through a samosa when a customer service agent called, sounding like the building was on fire. The next half hour went in finding what broke and fixing it.

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