HMV Xbox live misprice cancellation
I just got an email from HMV saying that they aren’t going to be honouring the misprice on 12 months of Xbox Live.
I was going to copy and paste the email they sent out in it’s entirety, but I thought it might be more fun to heavily doctor it first.
We are very sorry, but it has come to our attention that BLAH BLAH BLAH incorrect price of £2.99, instead of the more PROFITABLE FOR US price of £35.16. We trust that you CAN’T ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
We very much regret NOT BEING ABLE TO KEEP YOUR MONEY. No doubt you will be wondering what your rights may be in this matter, but, as we trust our terms and conditions governing our online sales make clear, YOU CAN’T DO SHIT BOY. As you may be aware, hmv has not yet taken payment from you for the goods listed above nor, indeed, taken the final step of confirming the shipment of your order to you by email (please see point b. in the section entitled ‘WE OWN YOUR ASS’ on the first page of our Terms and Conditions). So we trust you will therefore appreciate that there is not a legal requirement to make this item available at the PRICE THAT WE LISTED ON OUT WEB SITE FOR SEVERAL DAYS.
Once again, we really are very sorry about having to take this course of action resulting from what is a genuine error on our part, and whilst we do, of course, very much value you as a customer we hope that you will also understand our position and that you will be kind enough to accept our most sincere apologies AND NOTHING ELSE.
If you’re still after and Xbox live subscription, Amazon have got 12 months for £32.99, or if you don’t care when you get it, The Hut will have them for £30.36 when you use a 10% off voucher.
Edit: I guess I was in a bit of a foul mood when I got this, and I didn’t like the tone of the email at all. Sorry, I will try to not let things like this get to me.
Just got this message, interested to check my bank account tomorrow as they said the purchase didn’t complete as they didn’t take my money.
If they did I will kick off and see what happens.
In their defence, of all the misprice cancellation emails I’ve received, this is possibly the only one I’ve received that a) apologised, and b) explained where I could find the ‘get out of jail free’ clause in their terms.
They can hardly sell it at a loss given how many orders they likely received, can they?
More or less with Ash on this one. I just can’t find it in me to get pissed off when taking advantage of an offer which I knew was clearly a misprice. If it’s true that they’re covered legally, then they have no obligation to honour the deal. Anything more than a refund and an apology should be taken as bonus generosity.
The one time I have get really pissed off is when I bought Halo 3 from CD-WOW, when it was in stock, for a bargain price, only for them to cancel it afterwards, inform me that the stock has run out, and then immediately put the item back on sale for a much higher price. Seriously, fuck them; HMV have nothing on CD-WOW.
You forgot the part : “We now have your email address. Please be sure that you will receive our commercials from now on.”
Tis a shame trading standards dont seem to apply online.
Yeah, the message says they won’t go through with the order but it’s still on the order details page in my account as an open order at the discounted price. Worth keeping it there and seeing what happens?
Damn, Civ 5 and now this. At least Coolshop had the courtesy to give me a discount.
I also received the email and just thought “Wow, what a bunch of dicks.” I think it has happened before with a misprice last year.
Fair enough, I wonder how many bulk orders they received from people intending to resell.
They should have fixed it quicker, but did anyone SERIOUSLY expect them to honour the price? How much of a loss would they have made if they sent out the points, especially to the people who ordered more than one (much more in some cases)
It’s not like most of the people trying to buy this give a shit about HMV in the first place, so they don’t have much to lose in terms of ‘customer satisfaction’.
(of course you can go into ‘they did this just to get emails + signups etc’ territory for this one, which tesco seem to be famous for)
Meh, I tried this because it would’ve been nice to get it so cheap but I’m far from aggreived that a company isn’t willing to sell me something at massive loss to themselves just because they’ve made what is an obvious mistake on their website. As someone else mentioned the email they sent was polite and apologetic and editing it in the way you’ve done here just makes you look like incredibly childish. A company honouring a massive misprice is a nice thing for them to do; but them not doing so isn’t a bad thing and it certainly isn’t deserving of this bizarre over-reaction.
This is too often an occurrence and they use a loop-hole (kind of) to circumvent consumer’s rights that would apply in-store but not online.
The people behind the website are obviously far too casual, and within knowing anything about them, seemingly not very good at their job. I have done mindless boring data entry and product management, and it’s really not that hard to quickly double check you aren’t listing something for 10% of what you should be.
We have a right to be annoyed, and Lewie’s comments are fine from my perspective, especially with him being persecuted by a number of these retailers for what is essentially throwing them _a lot_ of business. When a product hits this site for cheap, it will often sell out very very quickly (quicker than things like Hotukdeals would).
You say “circumvent consumer’s rights” I say “reasonably protect themselves from silly mistakes costing them loads of money”; let’s call the whole thing off.
Awful jokes aside, data entry might well be easy but mistakes still happen and your position appears to be that it’s your god given right to profit from someone else’s mistake at their expense. This wouldn’t be an acceptable attitude in any other arena of life so I’m not sure why it suddenly becomes something people have the audacity to actually get annoyed about just because the other party happens to be a shop. And I don’t believe that Lewie’s otherwise excellent work on this site in general is a factor in whether people have a right to be annoyed about this. I mean I could understand if HMV had somehow left people out of pocket but what actually happened is people didn’t get something for dead cheap that they didn’t already have anyway, so where’s the harm y’know?
I agree that it’s relatively unimportant, and I also agree that we have no real moral stance here on being annoyed. If I was a shop I would do the same thing they do, but sites like this are often about one-upping and getting people, who, at this moment in time, are more likely than not in very uneasy financial situation. A part of me also acknowledges the fact that large companies like this make a business make quite an effort at exploiting consumers – point in note, the psychology of Tesco et al shelf stacking to present goods enjoyed by children at their eye level, rather than the parents. Tesco != HMV but the point stands that this is not a love-love relationship and is essentially us vs. them.
Consumers in-store have the right to demand a product at the price it is listed at. My point stems from this fact. It’s simply a case that rules and regulations for online sales has not caught up. This sucks.
We should be able to exploit their mistakes, because they are mistakes.
Legally, they’re covered of course. But the manner of the email was a bit insulting. Compare and contrast with the coolshop civ v email. I know hmv can afford to annoy people, but this email is still treating them with disregard. Just makes me want to spend my money at coolshop rather than the big guys.
Interestingly, I wonder if honouring the reduced price and receiving excellent PR for that would outweigh the loss they would have made?