Walmart cancels some SNES Classic Edition pre-orders due to website error (update)

It was briefly possible to pre-order the Super NES Classic Edition at Walmart, but the company now says it jumped the gun — and customers are reporting that Walmart is canceling their orders.

Pre-orders went live late Friday night, shortly after 11:30 p.m. EDT, and were available for just over half an hour before Walmart said it was out of stock (and its website crashed). Many customers, including multiple Polygon staffers, were able to place orders without a hitch during that small window.

The next day, however, pre-order customers began posting online to say that Walmart had canceled their orders. Some people received cancellation emails citing unverifiable payment information. But most of the chatter has concerned a purported screenshot posted on Twitter of a chat with a Walmart customer service representative, in which the employee says that pre-orders went live because of a “website error, since the manufacturer doesn’t have the preorder yet.”

The rep adds, “The orders that were already placed will be cancelled.”

Bo McMillan

A Polygon reader sent us screenshots of their own chat with Walmart customer service, and the rep told them the same thing. “We had to cancel this orders [sic] because this item was not scheduled to be displayed on the website yet,” the employee said. “We will have it available again soon though.”

Many people in a thread on the Nintendo subreddit about the aforementioned Twitter screenshot have said that they’ve also received cancellation emails from Walmart. But there are also plenty of folks for whom everything seems to be in order this morning, more than 48 hours after the fact (including multiple Polygon staffers). Naturally, this has led to widespread confusion and frustration, and not only because the SNES Classic Edition is such a hot-ticket item.

The first official statement on the matter from Walmart came earlier this morning, when the company’s official support account responded on Twitter to an anguished customer whose order had been canceled. “We are so sorry! The SNES Classics were released to soon [sic],” said a Walmart employee named Ash.

That tweet alone doesn’t confirm that Walmart is canceling all existing pre-orders. We’ve asked the company for further details, and we’ll update this article with any information we receive. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for information on when SNES Classic Edition pre-orders go live again — for real, when they’re supposed to.

Update (July 25, 11:07 a.m. ET): Walmart’s support account on Twitter continues to inform people that the retailer’s website pushed pre-orders live early. A representative named Red has tweeted at seven different customers in the past two hours to say that “this item was made available by accident.” However, the company still hasn’t said whether it’s canceling all existing pre-orders, and Walmart has not yet responded to Polygon’s request for comment.