Million-dollar typos cause worldwide losses

Charles Duncombe, an Internet entrepreneur based in the United Kingdom, recently told BBC News that websites could be losing millions in online sales because of poor spelling and grammar. Internet users wary of scams are reluctant to make purchases on websites riddled with errors.

“(Duncombe) measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected,” reported BBC News in July 2011.

"If you project this across the whole of Internet retail, then millions of pounds' worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes," says Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group.

These costly typos affect not only online sales, but also more sizable transactions. The placement of a single comma in a contract between Canadian telephone company Bell Aliant and Rogers Communications allowed Bell Aliant to terminate the agreement early. The termination meant the loss of $2 million for Rogers Communications. Despite Rogers Communications’ arguments about the intent of the contract, Canada’s telecommunications regulator cited rules of punctuation when ruling in Bell Aliant’s favor in 2006. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on which company you favor, the decision was overturned the following year on the grounds that the French version of the contract did not contain the same alleged error.

Typos also cost a great deal of money when they involve numbers. A missing comma and zeros in a lender’s lien changed $93 million to $93,000, causing U.S. insurance company Prudential to lose the difference in 1978. A misprinted date caused New York real estate developers to lose tens of millions in revenue. A misprinted phone number in an L.L. Bean catalog caused the retailer to pay a six-figure sum to purchase the erroneous phone number — the exact amount was not disclosed — in an effort to avoid losing customers. Even the rocket scientists at NASA were once forced to abort a multi-million-dollar mission because of a missing hyphen in a mathematical computation.

Like anyone else, I am human, and typos occasionally slip from my own fingers and from the keyboards of those near me. My wife still cringes when recalling that, 10 years ago, all our wedding announcements were printed, artfully tied with ribbon and stuffed in envelopes before we realized they listed the wrong address for the evening reception. Five hundred invitations had to be reprinted and tied to avoid sending guests to a nonexistent address.