A little wood turns into a mini tinder box
June 30th, 2009 by Jason Roe. Post is filed under Jason Roe.
I’m sure you have probably all heard about this by now.. It seems there was a bit of a burn out going on over at boards.ie yesterday in the bargain alerts forum.
Littlewood Ireland aka Shop Direct Ireland Limited had advertised a “Compaq mini desktop with 21.5in monitor” for €69.99 on their website. 34 pages later, it seemed like the little wood had all but gone up in flames! It turned out that this “bargain” was actually a pricing error on the part of Shop Direct.
It looks like all of the order have now been canceled. I’m no consumer expert! but id love to know what you think about this. Is it fair for a companies terms & conditions to allow this kind of thing to happen?
There are some unconfirmed reports that suggest that a number of users received their item by phoning up and switching to express delivery.
I filed a complaint with the national consumer agency. Let see what they have to say. I cant see how €549 turned into €69 .. is this a case of false advertising?
* Photo by millicent_bystander.
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June 30th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
It all sounds a little fishy to me!
I’d go for the false trading.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
It will be interesting to see how this plays out .. I cant wait for this story to hit the papers tomorrow!
July 6th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I ordered one of these last week and I haven’t heard anything yet. My credit card wasn’t debited so I don’t think they honoured the contract.
They are protected by law in this case. They have made an invitation for an offer, a PC for €69 but in order for this to be a binding contract they have to complete the transaction and debit your card. If this has happened then as far as I’m aware they have to honour the agreement and send out the goods.
This may explain why some people received the computer and others didn’t.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:49 am
…aaand the letter arrived in the door confirming that the payment was rejected and the order cancelled. Did anyone actually get one of these because I was definitely beaten to the punch.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:44 am
I remember the same happening Dell a year or so ago , and anyone that signed up was told tough luck – same with aer lingus as well recently if i remember correctly.
Think if it’s just a case of human error , it doesn’t have to be honoured.
July 19th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
The issue here isn’t that they advertised a product at a price and didn’t honour it IMO. I doubt anyone that went to buy the item actually thought it was €69. I would put good money on most people assuming it was human or system error and trying to get a cheap machine before the issue was fixed.
If they advertised for €69 and charged everyone €549 that would be false advertising and would be worth going to the NCA about.
December 15th, 2009 at 11:55 am
This was only an invitation to treat and not an offer therfor they are not obliged to sell their product at the false price