Can a company cancel a digital sale a week after you bought the item?

user1977

km1500 said:

You are missing the point.

Yes the law of contract allows for unilateral mistakes eg the wrong price displayed. This allows one party to say 'ooops sorry that price I advertised was an error' and allows the offer / acceptance to be cancelled and the contract nullified

What is does NOT do is allow one party to go back after a week once the goods have been shipped, to refund the price paid and take back the goods.

Thus if for example you bought a book from WHSmith, you would not expect a knock on the door 7 days later and a man saying sorry, that book was mispriced, here's the fiver you paid now give me the book back.

In practice of course, nobody would bother for something that trivial, but if the contract is voided then what do you think the consequences are? There are obvious practical difficulties if it's a physical item which has already been delivered, but in the OP's case I don't see why the parties can't easily be put back into their starting positions.

All of this is of course academic depending on what Norwegian law says...

Alderbank

MarvinDay said:

It's also worth remembering that the OP didn't purchase any physical goods, simply a licence to allow them to use a particular game and I would be very surprised if the T&C's they agreed to didn't allow for the access to be removed should an error in the sale be discovered.

I think km1500 is missing the point that this is a digital sale.

Microsoft Norway T&Cs confirm as you would expect that software purchase is conditional on the purchaser agreeing to the EULA, in other words the EULA is an agreed contract term. Purchasers must confirm they have read and agree to the EULA before download will commence.
What does the EULA for this game say?
If Norwegian law is similar to UK consumer law it might be possible to argue that the relevant EULA term allowing MS to revoke the licence is unfair to the purchaser so an Unfair Contract Term and can be ignored, but arguing it is Urettferdig kontraktsperiode in the Norwegian courts will be neither cheap nor easy.

Nearlyold

km1500 said:

I think the link discusses 'mistakes' where an order is placed but not yet shipped, or an email acknowledgement had been made but no human has confirmed etc etc..

However, once the offer has been made and accepted, and the goods shipped (or made available in the case of digital licence) then there is no way any person or organisation can come back a week later and say  ....oh hold on a min, I think I made a mistake there...

Actually, under Contract Law, the doctrine of Unilateral Mistake can be applied post acceptance or even completion - in a way that's kind of the whole point of it. If it only applied pre-acceptance and completion of an offer, it would be redundant because a potential party can decline acceptance anyway.

In this particular case where the goods are non-physical the Company have voided the contracts, there is nothing to stop the aggrieved recipients taking the matter to Court though I suspect they might have some difficulty convincing the Judge they had not realised the price was a mistake.

MobileSaver

km1500 said:

You are missing the point. ... What is does NOT do is allow one party to go back after a week once the goods have been shipped, to refund the price paid and take back the goods.

Sorry but you are the one missing the point; the whole point of "unilateral mistake" is that it allows exactly that.

What would the point be if it applied before a contract was made? One party would simply not agree to the terms of the contract.

 "Unilateral mistake" can only apply after the contract has been agreed (i.e. after the goods have been shipped for most online transactions) and absolutely does allow the seller to void the contract, take back the goods and issue a refund to put the buyer back to the same position they were originally in.

km1500

 As I said quite clearly in my post unilateral mistake applies post contract - in other words a contract has been formed and then someone realises for example that there is a pricing error and the contract is voided on the grounds of mistake -  that is exactly what I said

 What I also said is that the contract cannot be voided once the goods have been shipped and received (or digitally delivered).   This should be blindingly obvious otherwise you will have farcical situations where people receive goods and then the seller tries to reclaim them back.

 I will say it again because I am obviously not being clear - you cannot void a contract on the grounds of mistake once the goods have been shipped.

 I will also say that there may well be something in the EULA but using that is not grounds of 'mistake' it is whatever term is in the EULA

powerful_Rogue

km1500 said:

 As I said quite clearly in my post unilateral mistake applies post contract - in other words a contract has been formed and then someone realises for example that there is a pricing error and the contract is voided on the grounds of mistake -  that is exactly what I said

 What I also said is that the contract cannot be voided once the goods have been shipped and received (or digitally delivered).   This should be blindingly obvious otherwise you will have farcical situations where people receive goods and then the seller tries to reclaim them back.

Of course it can, what do you take by 'as if the contract never existed' to mean? The logistics of it don't matter. This is a prime example of a unilateral mistake and the goods have been taken back/removed.

MobileSaver

km1500 said:

unilateral mistake applies post contract ... the contract is voided on the grounds of mistake -  that is exactly what I said ...  What I also said is that the contract cannot be voided once the goods have been shipped and received

Can you not see the absurdity and contradiction of what you are claiming? On the one hand you say the contract can be voided then seconds later you say it cannot! What difference does the goods being shipped make once the contract has already been formed? (the answer is it doesn't make any difference.)

km1500 said:

otherwise you will have farcical situations where people receive goods and then the seller tries to reclaim them back

It's not farcical, it's the law. For the avoidance of doubt, yes, absolutely, if an obvious mistake has been made then (UK) law allows the seller to reclaim the goods back.

It also works both ways; if the buyer mistakenly agreed to pay £67 for goods costing 67p then according to you once the goods have been received the buyer cannot void the contract which is clearly ludicrous (and simply wrong).

Money_Grabber13579

km1500 said:

 As I said quite clearly in my post unilateral mistake applies post contract - in other words a contract has been formed and then someone realises for example that there is a pricing error and the contract is voided on the grounds of mistake -  that is exactly what I said

 What I also said is that the contract cannot be voided once the goods have been shipped and received (or digitally delivered).   This should be blindingly obvious otherwise you will have farcical situations where people receive goods and then the seller tries to reclaim them back.

 I will say it again because I am obviously not being clear - you cannot void a contract on the grounds of mistake once the goods have been shipped.

 I will also say that there may well be something in the EULA but using that is not grounds of 'mistake' it is whatever term is in the EULA

But most contracts are only formed when the goods are shipped so saying it only applies post formation of contract and before shipping of goods is a complete contradiction.

km1500

So in the original post the OP said they had paid for digital goods, received them and 7 days later the seller cancelled the contract and refunded.

I suppose an example in the real world would be you order, pay for and receive an air fryer from Amazon and 7 days later Amazon email you saying they made a mistake in the pricing and ask you to return the fryer for a refund.

On purely legal grounds, are either of them entitled to do that?

I think what we are discussing is what rights does a seller have against the buyer once the good have passed into the possession of the buyer (ignoring things like fraud etc) ie does the doctrine of unilaieral mistake in contracr law still apply.

Forwandert

I think they may have overlooked the occasional order but it was on all the deal sites (with the warning that it was probably a pricing error and could be cancelled)