"Our 1st Commandment is 'maintain a bullet-proof balance sheet,' but while the spirit is strong, the flesh made a mistake," Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne said in an Oct. 24 to shareholders. "The short version is: when we upgraded our system, we didn't hook up some of the accounting wiring; however, we thought we had manual fixes in place. We've since found that these manual fixes missed a few of the unhooked wires."

Overstock estimates that errors over the period in question -- 2003 through the second quarter of 2008 -- constitute a US$12.9 million reduction in revenue and a $10.3 million increase to cumulative net loss.

Overstock's director of investor relations, Kevin Moon, said the company blames only itself for the problems.

Overstock had previously used a homegrown system and rushed the Oracle implementation project in order to get the new system live before the fourth quarter of 2005 and the busy shopping season, according to Moon.

"Honestly, it didn't have anything to do with Oracle per se, it was the implementation," he said. "We had consultants and we had help, but it was all driven by Overstock. We set the timelines."