Sunglasses deal - what went wrong?

redux

Reaching the public is our main priority and we are proud to say that MyCityDeal has been featured, among other outlets, on Channel 4, The Daily Express, The Independent and TechCrunch.

statement quoted elsewhere by MyCityDeals, and it also has a panel on its website which says so

but the only reference I can find so far in the Independent is a passing mention in an article mainly about another company

and, according to Google:

Your search - site:www.express.co.uk mycitydeal - did not match any documents.

Your search - mycitydeals site:channel4.com - did not match any documents.

same for both if the s is omitted from the end, thus mycitydeal

Most of the Techcrunch stuff is first about the launch as a clone of Groupon, then the acquisition this week

Still, 1 out of 4 ain't bad, but it's not as good a score as that old Meatloaf song


Or perhaps someone will be better at me at finding some basis in their claims, perhaps a fleeting mention which doesn't quite fit the description featured though

wlf

exel1966 wrote: »

Martin,

Maybe you should be looking at this https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2473071
MyCityDeal as well, as exactly the same thing was done with price increases on the day of the deal !

Same thing happened with the mycitdeal/viagogo 'deal' as well and on a worse scale. MSE was not involved with that one and despite several emails to mycitydeal it was not resolved, with both mycitydeal and viagogo pleading ignorance when it was obvious what was going on.

My advice, steer clear of these mycitydeal 'pay for discount voucher' deals.

Former_MSE_Archna

sillywilly wrote: »

It was never a "cracking deal" but it got you roughly 10% + off their prices. The deal, with postage, actually cost £21.50 to get £50 off their prices.

I can't believe that you are buying their lies about their price increase. Does it state anywhere on their website that if demand increases then the price will increase? Please show me where it clearly states that.

You also state that - "Of course, as always, as soon as we realised this we got on the case both with MCD (who I have to say seem as frustrated as we are and really good about sorting this) and sunglasses-shop."

You were so "on the case" that it took them 12 hours and 2800 orders to eventually change the prices back to what they originally were.

Is there any explanation as to why Timmy 2000 was pretending to be a customer of the sunglasses shop but then later came on to defend their price fixing as an employee of this company?

It is clear from forums on this site and others on the internet that MCD "deals" and retailers have a long history of bumping up prices and adding restrictive terms that are not at all transparent when people sign up to the offer.

I think moneysavingexpert.com is a brilliant site with masses of very useful information. This is the first time I have come across a heavily promoted "deal" that wasn't at all what it purported to be. You all seem to be defending each other which IMO hints at some commercial and far from independent financial arrangement.

I truly hope that MCD and the sunglasses shop reap the benefits of all the negative publicity and lose any goodwill that they may have had.

If the sunglasses shop were actually going to put the prices back to what they initially were why did it take them 12 hours? They could have closed the site "for maintenence due to high demand" and changed the prices back immediately.

They didn't do that and if there had not been the constant negativity on this site, they wouldn't have.

Very fishy.

Hi sillywilly,

I'm not sure what more we could have done to help ensure no one paid more than they should have. As always the deals in the weekly email are included on the strength of the offer. This was a a cracking deal- £50 worth of sunglasses for £21.50 - proven by the number of people interested.

We had no way of knowing that the Sunglasses Shop would hike prices and soon as we did we got in touch. It says it reverted prices as soon as it possibly could (we have no reason not to believe it) and we're still monitoring to make sure there are no anomalies. Believe me, we have spent a great deal of time and many frustrated phone calls on this.

dmg24

MSE_Martin wrote: »

Sunglasses Shop says it has an automatic price system in place, so if demand increases and suppliers increase prices, the website will automatically update.

Sorry, this is absolute rubbish. If they had an automatic price system in place, why did the prices take so long to decrease? It would take seconds to input such a measure, yet it took them several hours.

This is also contradicted by their CEO, posting under the name 'Sunglasses Shop':

To ensure that the Sunglasses Shop did not lose money in running this test promotion we had to change our usual T&Cs and charge for delivery for products bought with these vouchers, lengthen the delivery time to 7 days, as well as raise the prices of certain brands of sunglasses (but only to levels still below the RRP).

1984ReturnsForReal wrote: »

I just want to know if Martin is going to give the money MSE made out of it to a good cause.

Its hardly right to keep it.

I am not for a minute saying that MSE were involved in creating this mess, but I would agree that it is sad for anybody to profit from such a bad situation.

hurdy

rsykes2000 wrote: »

Oooh, you can spell long words. Well done, aren't you a clever boy.
I can take the abuse, water off a duck's back as it were. The point to my response was to highlight your pathetic over-reaction to what in the scheme of things is a minor hiccup in life. Your spectacular toys out of the pram hissy fit to that just goes to show what a small, sad person you are.

+1 here. The incessant ranting is doing my swede in.

MSE_Martin

For anyone who this has caused an issue to, sorry. This was an unmissable deal that we checked through in detail so we wanted to tell you about it. As sometimes happens the companies looked like it wouldnt live up to their promise, but the bigger picture is weve thought hard to ensure that happens

Before starting, let's remember this was a simple bargain of spend £17.50 and get a £50 voucher for an online designer sunglasses shop. It should’ve been simple – for most people it has been. The only actual problem here so far is for a few specs the shop pushed prices up – out of order of course – and we’ve made that point very strongly.

Yet some of comments have been way out of proportion on this. The new group buying sites are springing up everywhere, its going to become a big thing and its a learning curve for us with them - its new and each time we do it we'll learn more about the potential pitfalls.

Frankly while we warn companies about the scale of the MSE email, sometimes there are problems simply because they can’t cope with it

Thanks for the many supportive comments about this.

Of course some have been negative, so let's respond to them (done at speed so forgive anything that doesn’t quite make sense).

sillywilly wrote: »

It’s a 10% discount at best

This has some very strange maths in it. This deal allowed you to get £50 of sunglasses from a shop for £21.50. That’s a lot better than 10% - it's well over 50%. Of course depending on what specs you got, the discount varies – and those specs may not be at the market's very lowest price, but the research we did shows they were genuinely competitive – so add in the discount and this was a cracker.

Now the fact the company in limited cases increased prices goes against all the information we feasbibly had and checked. The MCD terms do not allow this to happen and we checked the price of the specs before hand. This was not predictable, though I have now seen the links to a couple of other threads that this has happened once before with an MCD deal – and we’re now going to be much more focused on it (as are MCD from what it says).

For those thinking “it was in the forum why didn’t you know” remember there are 30 paperback books of info written here daily and 10,000s posts and 1,000s threads.

sillywilly wrote: »

You were so "on the case" that it took them 12 hours and 2800 orders to eventually change the prices back to what they originally were.

We reacted fast – things move quickly, the email only went out on Wed and we were on it in detail on Thursday. The first I heard of this was 7pm last night when the team emailed me – I’d been out on a huge shoot and was checking emails on my phone. I got back at 10 last night and found the team had been trying to piece together what was going on, sorting it out and posting there &then and have been trying to make sure it works for people since.

We were very firm with the companies in the background, yet if we start kicking off and calling people names on the forum we lose all our ability to try and push them to put things right – and that is my key concern. This deal has been a nightmare frankly - there’s been more going on than I can say at the moment (for fear of causing even more problems for those who want the deal – but I will write about it in future).

Most importantly though

A. Everyone whose specs (which is only two of the brands) rose in price will get a refund.
B. Everyone who wants, can get a refund from MCD.

If anything goes wrong, as I’ve said we’ll do all we can to push to make it work.

What’s deeply frustrating about some of these comments – is there should be no negative consequence of doing this – we’ve worked to ensure the result is EXACTLY as we stated and will continue to do so.
Please be patient (or if not get a refund) and as said, check the thead sunglasses deal if it goes wrong. But making predictions won't help.
·

haynick wrote: »

Sunglasses-shop grubby, MCD grubby, MSE grubby

How dare you. To suggest we’re grubby is downright offensive, defamatory and completely out of order. Yes there’s been a problem, but it was neither of our causing, nor predictable, and we’ve done everything possible to put it right. Sometimes things don’t go 100% as you expected – but to cast aspersions in such a way is hugely unfair.

MSE's entire reputation is built on trust, it's something I strive for and is at the centre of my belief system and how I’ve constructed the site. To denigrade that work in this way due to this issue is bizarre. Even a cynic would realise that we mess with that at our peril – so not only is the comment offensive, but blinkered and unrealistic.

1984ReturnsForReal wrote: »

Will MSE give the affiliate revenue to charity?

As for the question about giving money to charity, this totally FREE site funds 30 full time members of staff, has enormous costs, both legal, technical and others related to this forum as well as countless projects for charities. A good chunk of what comes in automatically goes to charity see http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/site/mse-charity-fund. We do that by ethically using affiliate links on deals we editorially rate as being good see http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/funding – this was certainly one of those.

I’ve had members of my team working hours and hours and me ensuring our users are fairly dealt with checking terms and conditions. If we’d made a mistake, acted unethically in any way, I could see your point (not that I’d want to do it as a precedent anyway – we separate our editorial and our affiliate links through a strict Chinese wall system and my team and I, barring two people, have nothing to do with it – it doesn’t effect the way we operate).

Yet we didn’t make a mistake – we haven’t acted unethically – a fourth party didn’t deliver exactly as expected – what we did is spend time, effort, and energy battling for our users to sort it out and make sure the deal lives up to its word and will continue to do so.

To those who’ve been supportive and understand the bigger MSE goal here of trying to bring good deals thank you. To those who think you’d get that duty of care from other sites or think we’ve deliberately done anything wrong or been negligent in any way – I’d strongly suggest you go elsewhere and don’t use this site again – as we can’t promise to do anything differently.

Martin

photome

wlf wrote: »

Same thing happened with the mycitdeal/viagogo 'deal' as well and on a worse scale. MSE was not involved with that one and despite several emails to mycitydeal it was not resolved, with both mycitydeal and viagogo pleading ignorance when it was obvious what was going on.

My advice, steer clear of these mycitydeal 'pay for discount voucher' deals.

It does suggest that the only reason the prices reverted back to pre voucher prices was because MSE stepped in, without that I suspect we would have had a battle to get them reduced

so Well done MSE

Raffles99

No-one has mentioned that Quidco pays £5 cashback to anyone ordering a deal from MyCityDeal.

This is where MSE hits a conflict of interest. If MSE was 100% dedicated to saving you money, it would have recommended you use Quidco, taking the cost down to £12.50.

Instead, people will have used the MSE link which, presumably, pays MSE the £5 instead. Based on the 10,000 vouchers ordered - a large % of which will be from the MSE link - you can see this is not a bad days work.

jamespir

the whole problem with these things isnt the companys the site or Martins fault its us us forum users this deal then gets posted on other forums so it goes to millions of people and then sites crash due to the amount of orders/ people wanting to order then those same people moan when they cant get the deal

jamespir

haynick wrote: »

My City Deals - Grubby
Sunglasses-shop - Grubby
MSE - Grubby


A very grubby affair indeed.

whats the point of being on the site then

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> doors that way close it quietly on your way out please