ASUS Chromebook Flip C436 listing mysteriously vanishes from Amazon

Just a few days ago, we broke the news that ASUS had already put up a product page on Amazon and was also accepting pre-orders. Knowing the new flagship Chromebook was due in early March, this wasn’t much of a surprise. The bigger shock came in the form of a firm release date in the listing. Along with the two models at $799 and $999, the listing also claimed the latest ASUS Chromebook Flip would be shipping in late February.

This was a welcome surprise and we were quite happy to share the news and judging by the number of folks who already ordered, I’d say plenty of readers were also pretty pumped to see this new Chromebook available for order with a sooner-than-expected ship date.

After that article went out, ASUS USA liked and retweeted our tweet about this news, so we have no reason to believe this was a mistaken listing. However, as of this morning, the listing we have linked in that article is completely gone. Any search for ASUS Chromebook Flip C436 comes up empty and it would seem that you can no longer pre-order this highly-anticipated Chromebook.

While this is a bit of a bummer, the bigger question is why it was handled this way. Sure, they could have sold out of pre-orders, but that doesn’t usually involve completely removing a product page. There are plenty of ways to change the listing to reflect overwhelming response, so I’m inclined not to believe that is the case. Instead, this looks very much like there was an issue of some sort with the listing and things are getting corrected before placing the page back online.

With ASUS giving us an unofficial nod on Twitter after posting, I’m thinking the problem isn’t likely an issue with timing or too much info being on display. If that were the case, I’d assume the listing would have been pulled down the day we published. So, what is the problem? Well, we’re just not sure about at this point. I’m having a hard time coming up with what would have been a big enough issue to completely remove the page aprt from there being some internal communication issues inside ASUS. The hard truth is we’re just waiting to see what happens next.

We’ve reached out and will update this article if/when ASUS officially responds, but I’m inclined to think we may see this listing show up again very soon with corrections made to whatever the problem was. We’ve heard from a few readers stating that they have not been contacted by Amazon about their pre-orders being cancelled, so that’s a good sign that this whole thing is a temporary problem. Hopefully it gets sorted soon, reappears quickly, and the February 24th date still holds: we’re pretty excited to get our hands on one for review for sure!