The Hut are very dishonest
Update: You can find a rather unsatisfactory update to this post here.
As an affiliate of lots of retailers, I get frequent emails from them telling me about their amazing offers. Sometimes they aren’t particularly good, sometimes they are, and I have to sort through them to find the best deals.
I got an email from The Hut telling me this:
Come celebrate your bank holiday weekend with www.thehut.com/home as we have gone voucher code crazy! These codes are available on EVERYTHING so don’t miss out this weekend! Massive savings and commissions are to be made!
So then I spent ages sorting through the games that they sell, and finding which ones were already a good price, so that they could be made even better by using the coupons. My policy with SavyGamer is that I never ever want to link to somewhere that isn’t the cheapest place to get a game from.
I found a bunch of great deals on games that they were already selling for cheap. Posted them up on SavyGamer along with the instructions of how to use the coupons. These offers were available for a short amount of time when I first posted them. Then, because they are dishonest, The Hut increased the prices of most of the games that were actually good deals when using those coupons. Here’s what they did:
Halo: Reach, Xbox 360 – was £37.93, £35.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Halo: Reach [Limited Edition], Xbox 360 – was £55.93, £51.93 with coupon. Increased to £59.93, £55.93 with coupon.
Brink, PC – was £24.93, £22.93 with coupon. Increased to £26.93, £24.93 with coupon.
Nier, Xbox 360 – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Wii – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £23.93, £21.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Xbox 360 – was £23.93, £21.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, PS3 – was £23.93, £21.93 with coupon. Increased to £39.93, £37.93 with coupon.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, PC – was £14.93, was £13.93. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Batman: Arkham Asylum [GOTY], Xbox 360 – was £16.93, £15.93 with coupon. Increased to £17.93, £16.93 with coupon.
Napoleon: Total War [Imperial Edition], PC – was £12.93, £11.93 with coupon. Increased to £17.93, £16.93 with coupon.
Legend Of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, DS – was £17.93, £16.93 with coupon. Increased to £24.93, £22.93 with coupon.
GTA: Episodes From Liberty City, Xbox 360 – was £13.93, £12.93 with coupon. Increased to £29.93, £27.93 with coupon.
Forza Motorsport 3, Xbox 360 – was £12.93, £11.93 with coupon. Increased to £14.93, £13.93 with coupon.
As you can see, for the most part their prices were far better before the ‘discount’ coupon was made available. If I were cynical, which I definitely am, I’d say that this was a deliberate deception to increase traffic to their site without actually offering any discount at all. Some of these are preorders, so it’s hardly like there would have been issues with them running out of stock forcing them to increase the price.
I’m going to speak to them on Monday and see what they have to say for themselves. But from now on I am definitely going to keep an eye on how they fiddle with their prices whenever they do have discount coupons.
Contact the Office of Fair Trading. http://www.oft.gov.uk/
That isn’t a “sale” or special offer, it’s misrepresenting of their prices. Those who know of the vouchers, get to buy at normal price, while those who don’t spend more than normal. Devious is an understatement and I’m glad I’ve never shopped with them.
I will do on Monday, after speaking to The Hut.
Can i just play devil’s advocate here and suggest that it’s no more dishonest than deliberately exploiting weaknesses in their system to obtain further discount?
Really? Using a coupon that they email to me and ask me to spread around in a way that it is completely allowed to be used?
I don’t think sending paying customers to their web site is exploiting them.
I assume adam means that business with switching currencies to trick the store into giving you a discount in one currency on a purchase in another. It is pretty clearly an exploit. Nowhere near as dickish as putting all the prices up after advertising and sending out a discount code, though.
One is legal, the other is not.
Oh, that makes a bit more sense.
Well, I still think that’s fair game. Presumably they intended those coupons to have that functionality for their international customers, but the exploit was probably unintentional.
The pressure is on them to not make mistakes like that, not us to ignore it when they do.
Damn right it’s fair game. It’s up to the seller to plug up the holes in their system, and if they exist, then it’s acceptable to use these “exploits”/”holes”/”mistakes”. It’s like the exploits that have been documented in Eve Online (the banking misdeeds and guild corruption and betrayal). You might ask what that has to do with The Hut, but it’s the same thing; it may not have been intended (or publicly acknowledged as intended), but these holes/exploits are part of the game, part of the system, and until that’s changed, rules made/altered and enforced, then they are there to be used.
I only have so much money for things, and I’ll go for the cheapest option I can find. When publishers like Activision jack up prices of games as part of an experiment to see if they can get away with it, I get frugal.
Interestingly I brought £40+ of stuff for the £4 off, some games I should have got a while ago – Red Alert 3 actually, when I checked in a second browser (which I was just doing for some reason), went up in price dramatically.
I’d have thought they had some automatic way of detecting sales and bumping up prices if there are not many in stock, although since they don’t show stock numbers I have no idea why, so perhaps the reason that things are popular is it.
I’d like to hear the followup! Will make me go to Amazon more if it is so.
Anything new on this?
Supposedly they will be getting back to me today. We’ll see.
Did they get back to you?
Still working on it.
Still no update?