Mistaken offers – Page 2

An item in the Readers’ Queries feature on the Consumer page in last week’s Irish Times caught my eye, not least because it raised very interesting issues about ordering goods online:

Online TV deal too good to be true

A reader was on the Arnotts website recently pricing televisions when he found a 42” model for €1,498. According to the site it had a discount of €1,400. “A TV for €98? Where could I go wrong? So I put in my Laser card details, expecting to be told the order could not be processed due to a pricing error but no, it went through. I got a confirmation e-mail a few minutes later with an order number,” he writes.

He “kept checking the tracking of the order on their web page and it said the order was processed and waiting for a delivery date. Later that evening I got an e-mail saying they had made an error in pricing and my order was cancelled.”

The incident has left him curious. “Since Arnotts never took any money from my account but did issue the order number, do they have to honour the order or are they completely within their rights to cancel it?

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A salutary tale of a mistaken price

4 September, 200920 August, 2019

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Via ContractsProf, I learn that US discount retailer Best Buy will not honour a $9.99 big-screen TV deal which it had offered for sale on its website, because the terms on the site reserved its right to revoke offers or correct errors even if a credit card has already been charged. This is just the latest example of a common phenomenon; the biggest Irish example was last year’s Aer Lingus mistakenly priced flights fiasco; and they are in good company: it has happened to Amazon (2003); Argos (1999 and 2005); Avon (2004); Buy.com (1998); Dell (several times: 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008 – twice); Hoover (1992); Kodak (2002); Thai Airways (2003), Sony products in France (2004), and (hat tip Legal Eagle in the comments) JB Hi-Fi in Australia (2009).

Best Buy protected themselves against such errors by providing for them in their Conditions of Use:

Errors on Our Site
… Errors will be corrected where discovered, and Best Buy reserves the right to revoke any stated offer and to correct any errors, inaccuracies or omissions including after an order has been submitted and whether or not the order has been confirmed and your credit card charged.

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Dell’s Mistake

1 September, 20085 September, 2022

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It is the error everyone online dreams about – a full-price item for practically nothing; and it happened, in Chile. For those who remember the case of the mistaken flights last April, Andres Guadamuz tells us about a massive pricing error made by Dell on its Latin American website last June:

… One of Dell’s main features is the possibility of configuring computers by adding, removing or upgrading components. On 27 June 2008, this feature went wrong, and started subtracting money for an upgrade instead of adding it. … Apparently, some people in Chile found the mistake, and this being the Web 2.0 universe, left messages in Facebook and blogs advertising the gaffe, .. This resulted in an astounding 66 … times increase in sales in that day for Chile, and apparently thousands attempted to get the exploit (unofficially, 15 thousand laptops!). Needless to say, Dell did not fulfil the orders, and offered the affected customers a 15% discount in future sells. …

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The Case of the Mistaken Flights

18 April, 200820 August, 2019

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Look up, it’s Aer Lingus
Aer Lingus used to know how to do public relations – in my youth a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it had three very powerful advertising campaigns which had a profound effect on me. One used the Gallagher & Lyle song “Breakaway” (YouTube) featuring the lyric “breakaway, fly across your ocean / breakaway, time has come for you”. The second featured the musical tag line “Look up, it’s Aer Lingus, there’s a little piece of Ireland flyin’ by”, with a little girl playing in a field looking up at an Aer Lingus Boeing flying overhead – it gave rise to Aer Lingus’s most enduring slogan, which I have used at the head of this paragraph. And the third was called “You’re Home” (YouTube) and featured Gabriel’s Oboe; it never failed to induce a catch in the voice, a lump in the throat, and a tear in the eye. Judging by a controversy that has flared over the last day or two, however, they seem long since to have lost this knack for connecting with the Irish zeitgeist. Instead, they have flown into a tempest of controversy which they moved to abate only after two days of pressure amounting to a public relations debacle for the airline.…