A UK retailer has honoured a redditor's £20 Fractal Design PC case purchase: 'You made it go viral. So we did what we believe is right—we owned it.'

With seas of stock to maintain, plus piles of product pages to go along with every item, listing mistakes happen. Should an eagle-eyed shopper scoop a downright unreasonably priced bit of kit, it's often a toss up as to whether the supplier will either cancel the order, or quietly honour the few orders that get through before promptly updating the listing and acting like nothing happened. Either way, most companies would avoid making much noise about it.

Apparently, London-based Gotraka isn't like most companies. One lucky Redditor spied an absurdly good deal on the black midi version of the Fractal Design North PC case. Gotraka normally sells this case for around £155 (about $205), but the poster snapped it up when it was briefly listed for only £20 (a little under $27).

Gotraka not only honoured this incredibly low price, but even sent the buyer a note with their order. This read, "We made a pricing mistake. You made it go viral. So we did what we believe is right—we owned it."

Gotraka itself has since shared a blog post going into more depth about how the pricing mistake happened. Apparently, the company has been in the process of developing a custom build system for its website. 'Team Gotraka' explained, "To get it ready, our dev team has been testing the matrix (literally). They’ve been linking thousands of parts, compatibility data, and live pricing. And somewhere in that tangled web of code and caffeine, one of our test prices slipped into the live site."

Rather than cancel the resulting orders, the company chose to treat it as a happy accident even calling the pricing mistake's popularity "the best kind of beta test we could’ve asked for." What could've been a quiet embarrassment has been leveraged into a far louder, profile-raising win for the smaller UK brand.

A short story in 4 images from r/pcmasterrace

But, in Gotraka's own words, it's a principled brand that "stands by our word." On the subject of principles, an interesting side note is that Gotraka bills itself as a company with sustainability in mind.

The company's About page not only references the UK's own mountains of e-waste, but also briefly discusses Gotraka's own hopes for a circular supply system, reading, "We want to recover as much product as we can to reduce the mining of new resources." It'll be interesting to see if this smaller company can leverage its new-found visibility into a less e-wasteful future.