The Hut Coupon shenanigans extends to Zavvi
Regular SavyGamer readers will no doubt be familiar with the ongoing saga of The Hut’s policy on coupons.
Twice now I’ve caught them out bumping up the price of items to coincide with coupons. You can find the details here, here and here. The end result in most cases was that the increase in price resulted in it being the same price, or more often more expensive, than they were before the coupon was issued.
It appears that this practice is now extending to other retailers that are part of The Hut Group. Most recently Zavvi.
Vanquish has been £28.99 to preorder from them for a while, on both 360 and PS3. I first noticed that rather good price last Tuesday, and posted it here and here.
Then I realised that this offer could be improved by using the coupon “ZAVVIFIVE”, for £5 off a £50 spend (it was actually £50.01), that Zavvi had emailed to me and all their affiliates about previously. I posted it up here, with some other similar deals. My data suggests it was a pretty popular deal amongst you lot, not surprising after the fantastic demo (The problem with Vanquish is that it’s just a game about shooting robots and flying around really fast like a badass and then punching robots in the face).
Before the coupon had expired though, they bumped the price of it up to £32.95 on both platforms. I didn’t notice any other examples, but my all seeing bargain eye could have been diverted by discounts elsewhere. It’s entirely possible they did this for lots of items, not just this one popular game.
Like an idiot I didn’t record any evidence of the price bump…so uh, I guess you can either take my word or not. Now that the coupon has expired, it’s gone back to it’s pre-coupon price. Sadly google’s cache of it is before the price bump.
From now on I’ll keep a closer eye on all retailers that are part of The Hut group, and include a coupon disclaimed wherever applicable. The applicable retailers are:
Argos Entertainment
Asda Entertainment
SendIt.com
WHSmith Entertainment
Woolworths Entertainment
Zavvi
I think that’s the lot.
If anyone can suggest a way to find a record of the price bump, please let me know. The coupon expired on the 9th, so it should have been just before then.
I was thoroughly displeased when they did not commit to the price (error) on the two-pack PS3 games. If it was a street retailer I believe they have to stick to that price. Amazon and other reputable places have, in the past at least, honoured the erroneous prices.
Keep up the good investigative work!
I think in future we should offer you back-up with collective screen grabs.
There is no obligation for a retailer to honour the price on an item that has been wrongly applied in store, to my knowledge. I think this is fair. Otherwise, human or technical error could result in losses for companies that sometimes can ill afford such things. In a store, as soon as you receive the receipt that is a contract (Although on-line I am not entirely sure where the process would reach its point of peripeteia). I’m sure if a retailer was exposed as deliberately mismanaging its prices to draw in custom, the process would be dealt with differently.
They don’t have any obligation to honour the incorrect price, however it’s against proper trading practice to advertise something at below the price in order to garner publicity and traffick. If a store has mispriced something and refuse to sell it to you for the misprice they must remove all copies of that mispriced product from store shelves.
The contract of sale is actually formed when you hand over the money. Online most retailers simply don’t charge you until after they’re shipped the product and claim in the T&A that the contract is formed when they ship, not when money is taken.
Amazon are very good with this sort of thing. They cut the price of a boxset I ordered by £10 3 or 4 days later, I emailed them asking if I could cancel the order (which had dispatched, I received it the next day) and send them the item back so I could re-order. They simply refunded the difference. Incredible.
@Gordon
happy man… I had no such luck with Zavvi when i kindly asked for a commercial gesture after I paid Blazblue: Calamity Trigger for about 22€ and it dropped to 14€ before I even received it.
Oh, and the case was broken. I was sent a cheap, non-official replacement.
I still have a FIFA11 pre-order pending with Zavvi, so I’ll wait to see how that unfolds, but I am very disappointed.
I don’t really see the problem here. Vanquish was 28.99 for some time, even while the coupon was available. I even preordered it using the coupon durin one of the Mega Mondays I believe. Making a big deal about nothing here.