Kitchen purchase

Biglad626

Hi I all, looking for some consumer advice concerning a kitchen purchase please, I hope I'm in the correct area:
We purchased a new kitchen supply only, which was over £16,000
This particular company requires full payment before delivery! Basically from the initial delivery half the kitchen was missing, it tooks hours of emails and phone calls daily and working out what was missing, we were sent some large units incorrectly 3 times, each time we were assured they were correct and paid a fitter to build them and dismantle them twice which was several hundreds of pounds, to get to the point, there were a multitude of problems and it took six weeks of stress to get the kichen we paid for, we are about £1000 out of pocket for extra labour and materials, we asked to speak to the MD but he wouldn't speak to us, we asked for a fitter remove and re-build these large units but again they refused, so we have filed a small claim to recover the extra costs, they have decided to counter claim saying we breached a confidentially clause in the contract because I wrote a negative review on Trust Pilot and are claiming the profit margin on a lost sale which they say is over £4000! Can Anybody give any advice on this please as my wife is really worried about this bullying. Would really appreciate any thoughts.
Regards
Biglad626

tacpot12

What does the confidentially clause say? There is a chance that it could be written so widely as to be regarded as an unfair contract term.

I would be surprised if they could prove that your review directly caused the loss of any specific contract. It would need the prospective customer to sign a witness statement that states that it was your review and no other reason that caused them cancel their order. They would also have to confirms the value for the order they intended to place. I doubt any potential customer would ever sign such a statement, unless they are friends of the business owner.

Can you and have you withdrawn the review?

The following video may be of assistance:
https://youtu.be/SEKPkyQRVMM

tacpot12

Not sure what others would think about this, but if the company are registered with TrustPilot, and especially if they are a paying customer of TrustPilot and invited you to leave a review, they are subject to TrustPilot's T&Cs, and therefore their Code of Ethics that state that these underpin their "core values of integrity, trust and transparency". One could argue that having a confidentiality clause that forbids customers from posting negative reviews is not inline with the TrustPilot code values, and hence not inline with the Code of Ethics that the company has agreed to when they registered with TrustPilot (even if this was for a free account).


I think you are going to need some legal advice about breach of confidence to ensure you can defend against the counter-claim.

tacpot12

Have you given anything to the company that they could use to prove that your were the author of the negative review, or is there anything in the review that ties it back to you and you alone?

Biglad626

Thank for the initial responses, I have removed the review now, is clear that it was me, there are loads of negative reviews about this particular company and we were so frustrated about the lack of response from management that I vented by writing reviews (review centre too and Google)
There was nothing slanderous just factual information regarding the poor service.
We hoped he'd realise all the extra cost was unfair and make us an offer but he has come out fighting and caught us off guard but I'm confident they would find it very hard to prove a lost sale surely!?
We were hoping not to need legal advice butbi guess we will have to. 😞

searchlight123

Biglad626 wrote: »

Thank for the initial responses, I have removed the review now, is clear that it was me, there are loads of negative reviews about this particular company and we were so frustrated about the lack of response from management that I vented by writing reviews (review centre too and Google)
There was nothing slanderous just factual information regarding the poor service.
We hoped he'd realise all the extra cost was unfair and make us an offer but he has come out fighting and caught us off guard but I'm confident they would find it very hard to prove a lost sale surely!?
We were hoping not to need legal advice butbi guess we will have to. 😞

whereabouts are you based?
there is a very good consumer show on BBC Three Counties Radio (Beds, Herts and Bucks) 11am -12pm mon - fri, and this is just the sort of thing they would take an active interest in and fight your corner.