Acceptance of order price mismatch and cancelled order

wealdroam

Underthesea, have they sent you an Acceptance Confirmation or not?

You posts seem unclear on this point.

If they have not sent you an email that explicitly says it's an Acceptance Confirmation, then the contract does not exist and you have no claim for anything more than a refund of monies paid.

underthesea

Whenever i've ordered from this company, none of their emails say ' Acceptance Confirmation'. They don't send an email which says that. The last email I have always had has been 'payment processed' which states the delivery time whenever i've ordered from them before.

I take the the 'payment processed / delivery' email


Payment Processed
"Dear X
We can now confirm that your order (X) has been processed and payment has been successfully taken.

The order will be delivered on your selected delivered date. An email will be sent as soon as your order is dispatched from our warehouse."

So far
-Order placed online
-they have sent "We are sending this email as an acknowledgement of your order" (email on the day after I made the order)
-Payment Processed email (as above received 3 days later)

EDIT:
Just checked out, the price difference is £15 on an item that was £150. Would you agree this is not a major drop and not constitute as 'obvious and unmistakeable ' ?
to me, 'obvious' means the famous cases like something sold for 99p instead of £99

wealdroam

So, if you haven't got an Acceptance Confirmation, then it strikes me that there is no contract in place.

What other conclusion can we draw, especially as they are not going to send the goods?

I do agree with you last point though, a 10% price difference is not an obvious mistake.

What company are we talking about?

underthesea

I am taking the 'payment processed, we will dispatch' as Acceptance Confirmation as that is always the last email I get before one saying it is literally dispatched. I've looked though all my orders and never seen a 'Acceptance Confirmation' in any comms from them.

Their T&C states
we will confirm such acceptance to you by sending you an e-mail that confirms that we have accepted your order (the Acceptance Confirmation) The contract between us (Contract) will only be formed when we send you the Acceptance Confirmation.

Big online electronic goods retailer. No name calling in this thread, yet..

Ectophile

underthesea wrote: »

I won't be documenting 'principle' on the forms if they force me to take action! Courts should uphold the law and not ignore it, even if small as it sends a message not to be crooked across the whole of the UK. Otherwise, every company would be doing this.

There is a legal term "de minimis", which refers to something too trifling for the court to waste time over.

vaio

there is EU law on this which, from memory, says that the contract is formed when the acceptance screen is displayed rather than needing an email.

Certainly, once they have taken the money the contract must be formed and I'd say 10% is not a big enough error to let them get out on "mistake" so, whilst they can cancel they are in breach and the normal remedies for a breach of contract are available to you.

Sasahara

A contract being formed or not is an irrelevant issue here as a full refund would end any standard purchasing contract.

If they were trying to make you pay more than the advertised price as a general practice and using a low price just to get customers with no intention of honouring then the ASA and trading standard could get involved. (That isn't the case here)

bris

vaio wrote: »

there is EU law on this which, from memory, says that the contract is formed when the acceptance screen is displayed rather than needing an email.

Certainly, once they have taken the money the contract must be formed and I'd say 10% is not a big enough error to let them get out on "mistake" so, whilst they can cancel they are in breach and the normal remedies for a breach of contract are available to you.

Can you link to that please? Doubt it.

In the UK we work on offer and acceptance a computer can not accept the offer, this is why these mistakes are only discovered after a humam processes the order, they are the ones who can either accept or reject your offer.

Without knowing the company we will have to just take the OP's word on their T&C's, funny that we can't check for ourselves.

vaio

Sasahara wrote: »

A contract being formed or not is an irrelevant issue here as a full refund would end any standard purchasing contract.

If they were trying to make you pay more than the advertised price as a general practice and using a low price just to get customers with no intention of honouring then the ASA and trading standard could get involved. (That isn't the case here)

Really? I'd have said whether a contract is formed or not is critical......if one is formed (and I struggle to see how it's not) then a breach by the seller leaves then open to all sorts of actions, specific performance, buyer obtaining same goods elsewhere and recovering the additional costs from the buyer, loss of bargain etc etc.

A refund of the price paid isn't necessarily a sufficient remedy for a breach of contract (although it often is), as that just puts the buyer back in the position he was before the contract was formed.

The real remedy is to put the buyer in the position he would have been in had the contract been fulfilled.

It's sort of the whole point of contracts.

vaio

bris wrote: »

Can you link to that please? Doubt it.

In the UK we work on offer and acceptance a computer can not accept the offer, this is why these mistakes are only discovered after a humam processes the order, they are the ones who can either accept or reject your offer.

Without knowing the company we will have to just take the OP's word on their T&C's, funny that we can't check for ourselves.

The Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002 incorporates the EU Electronic Commerce Directive 2000/31/EC

from wiki

.....
Contractual Construction

reg 12 provides that a contractual offer occurs when the order is sent. Richards[10] construes reg 11(2) as providing that the acknowledgement screen will constitute a contractual acceptance......

but even if Richards is wrong then an acknowledgement email and/or taking the money must create a contract. Without a contract the buyer doesn't owe the seller anything so there is no basis for the seller to collect the money