Sound Familiar? Walmart Blames Glitch for Website Price Errors

Walmart.com/AOL NEW YORK -- Treadmills for $33? Computer monitors for $9? The deals are too good to be true -- even at Walmart. It turns out they're not. Walmart Stores Inc. (WMT) says a "technical error" caused certain products to be priced absurdly low or high on its website earlier Wednesday morning. The company said it's working to resolve the issue and that the site may have intermittent problems with availability until then. "We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers," said Ravi Jariwala, a spokesman for Walmart's online operations. Earlier Wednesday, shoppers took to Twitter to cite ridiculously low prices like treadmills for $33.16 and Hewlett Packard LCD monitors for $8.85. Jariwala declined to comment on whether it would honor bargains that customers scooped up and said it was still working through the details. Heading into the crucial holiday shopping season, Walmart has doubled the number of items it has on its website from last year to 5 million. That's expected to help fuel a 30 percent growth in online sales to $10 billion for its current fiscal year, which ends in late January. That's still just a sliver of the $486 billion in annual sales Walmart did last year. Walmart is based in Bentonville, Ark. We're not saying you should give up shopping on Black Friday altogether. Just do it online instead. At one point it may have been true that Black Friday was for in-store deals, while Cyber Monday was for the e-commerce set. But these days, retailers are taking pains to offer a seamless experience between their online and bricks-and-mortar channels, and that means many of the marquee Black Friday deals can be had from the comfort of your couch. "[Retailers] continue to get better at syncing the online and offline experience," says Brad Wilson of BradsDeals. "95 percent-plus of deals are going to be available both online and offline."