Mis-sold an item from M&S but gift card was used

powerful_Rogue

The_Fat_Controller said:

@powerful_Rogue if you were moving home and now had £650 stuck in useless gift vouchers, no sofa and no further funds to buy one, how do you think you would feel ?

Not many people have spare money around when moving home.

I sympathise with the OP but they are pretty much stuck between a rock and a hard place because of M & S's website error.

Oh I empathise with the OP, but M&S have fulfilled their legal obiligations and so have the gift card company.

Goodwill is all that is left, but I doubt the OP will receive that from M&S or the giftcard company. As such, look at proper alternatives - Sell the gift card, use it for shopping, look for a free 2nd hand sofa to tide you over etc.

This section is Consumer Rights remember.

ellenvan

I have used a £100 giftcard to buy 5 smaller £20 ones.
If you did similar you stand a chance of selling for maybe 10% discount to friends and family.
That way you will re-coup some of the money and can spend some on food purchases etc.

Alderbank

Sometimes a cloud has a silver lining.

M&S Summer Bank Holiday Monday sale is on 29th August. They say sofas up to 50% off.

Manxman_in_exile

@Deltadia -  I'm pretty certain that if you placed the order using a gift card, then the only legal obligation that M&S has is to refund you via the same "means of payment"  ie gift card.

However, for the sake of getting a refund of up to £650 (or whatever you actually paid for the card) I'd persist with M&S customer services and try to persuade them that if it hadn't been for the error on their website, then you would not have bought the gift card in the first place because you were only ever going to use it to purchase the item that they had wrongly misdescribed on their website.  Emphasise to them that their admitted error on their website has caused you to tie up £650 on a giftcard that you now have nothing to use on at a time whan you need the money.

I wouldn't expect them to do anything other than refund to the card, but if you don't at least ask you certainly won't get.

This is one of the reasons I rarely use gift cards or vouchers.  If you can buy them at a discount and whatever you want to use them for goes ok, then they have their place.  But if it goes wrong...

In particular, I'd never buy vouchers specifically to fund a particular purchase.  Too risky if you end up stuck with them.

Alderbank

Unless I have misunderstood the first post I don't think the OP bought the giftcard from M&S.

'I bought substantinal amount of giftcard (640) of M&S from corporate rewards site to buy a new sofa'

These corporate rewards sites are subscribed to by large companies, councils, NHS etc. to offer as a benefit for their employees.
The rewards site buys large blocks of giftcards from retailers like Argos and M&S at a discount of about 7%. The benefit to the retailer is that they immediately get the discounted payment with no risk of claimbacks and with the small possibility that a giftcard will expire unused.
The rewards site then offers the giftcards to eligible employees at a discount of about 5% off the face value of the giftcard.
Those sites all warn purchasers that the giftcards are not refundable, will not be replaced if lost and have an expiry date.

If M&S sold a £100 face value giftcard for £93 (or less) because it was a guaranteed B2B contract with no comeback, why would they buy it back from an unrelated third party for £95 or more?

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

Alderbank said:

Unless I have misunderstood the first post I don't think the OP bought the giftcard from M&S.

'I bought substantinal amount of giftcard (640) of M&S from corporate rewards site to buy a new sofa'

These corporate rewards sites are subscribed to by large companies, councils, NHS etc. to offer as a benefit for their employees.
The rewards site buys large blocks of giftcards from retailers like Argos and M&S at a discount of about 7%. The benefit to the retailer is that they immediately get the discounted payment with no risk of claimbacks and with the small possibility that a giftcard will expire unused.
The rewards site then offers the giftcards to eligible employees at a discount of about 5% off the face value of the giftcard.
Those sites all warn purchasers that the giftcards are not refundable, will not be replaced if lost and have an expiry date.

If M&S sold a £100 face value giftcard for £93 (or less) because it was a guaranteed B2B contract with no comeback, why would they buy it back from an unrelated third party for £95 or more?

If purchased via a website wouldn't the the purchaser be a consumer and the site a trader meaning there's a right to cancel which would be extended to 1 year and 14 days without the required information? 

A headache for sure to enforce and probably easier for OP to sell the gift cards, I just wondered. 

Alderbank

Well spotted, the_lunatic_is_in_my_head.
I meant, but did not make clear, that they say the giftcard is not refundable from the issuer (M&S in this case) meaning you can't buy a giftcard at a discount then claim a cash refund from M&S for the face value

One rewards site I can see online includes the following in T&Cs:

 

Gift Cards and Vouchers (“Vouchers”)

4.3 Return of Vouchers. You have a legal right to change your mind within 14 days of receiving the Vouchers. Provided that you have not used some or all of the value of the Vouchers within that 14 day period, you may contact us to request a refund for the Vouchers. We may require you to return the Vouchers to us.

I think the above form of words, if sent to you with the giftcard, would be sufficient for the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013.

We don't know which rewards site the OP used.

OP, which rewards site did you buy the M&S giftcard from? What refund information did they send with the card?

The_Fat_Controller

@Alderbank, see the OP's post at 1.51 pm

They have used the originally purchased reloadable giftcard and been refunded to a different e-giftcard.

sheramber

The OP did not buy  a £650 gift card from M%S so they do not have £650 in money to refund him. He paid his money to the rewards company.

Since the OP does not want o buy from M&S what advantage would there bee for him to have a reloadable gift card.

Deltadia

Thanks peeps. After reading through all your input and advises it seems I am really only left with relying on the goodwill of M&S...which I dont think I will get from how their agents were...

About the giftcard, I do own reloadable giftcard for M&S, which I typically used for small grocery shopping. And this was used to pay the initial order but M&S refunded me with new e-gift card (a single e-gift card of 650....). I use reloadable card as with e-gift cards, you tend to have multiple cards with less than a pound left and you get disorganised quickly. Whereas with reloadable, you just have one card to manage

@Alderbank The corporate reward site is managed by Rewards Gateway. And you assume right, most of the gift cards/vouchers on the site are non-refundable once the voucher is opened. And with the case of reloadable cards, they state they cannot provide a refund. On the M&S gift card site, however, I saw below statement. So I wanted to see if there are any grounds since it was M&S error on their site.

Gift cards cannot be returned or refunded, except in accordance with legal rights. 

@Manxman_in_exile it was quite a harsh lesson because of the timing but I will think more about the consequence of the order not being fulfilled when using gift cards. I certainly did not have any imagination that I would be put in this situation. I will most likely to pursue the avenue of selling the giftcard to friends and family but even that will be a hassle as M&S refunded it into single card.....

@powerful_Rogue I appreciate your bluntness as some facts wont change no matter how you sugar coat it. But I would appreciate if you could dish out your blunt advises whilst reading what I wrote. There isnt really an alternative to spend in M&S for me. I tried looking for alternative items to spend this afternoon, I need some curtain rails/rods but they only do curtains not rods and other big furnitures I have already placed the order elsewhere. So I am stuck with 650 gift card which I will now need to chase them to split into different denominations or spend it in small groceries which will take absolutely ages to spend as I am moving from London to Farnborough where there is no M&S except for one in BP ..