Online Retailing in Spain Hits A Bump In The Road For A Spanish Company Who Are Ordered To Supply At The Incorrect Price

As the online retail business across Spain continues to grow despite being a long way behind other parts of Europe a bump in the road has been hit by one Spanish online retail company.

Programming your offerings onto your website correctly has become even more important after one Company in Spain entered into their website platform mobiles at the incorrect price.

Mobile phones were listed at the incorrect price of 130 Euro’s instead of over 700 Euro’s that saw a mass of online shoppers take full advantage but the retailer refused to deliver saying it was a mistake and staff error when programming their website retail products and prices and sent back refunds to payment cards with the message that it was an error, a simple process for an online retailer , over15,000 phones were ordered at the “mistake” prices in total and when they were no delivered caused a storm of protest and complaints.

The Company in question was retailer FNAC who thought they were following standard retail laws that exist in shops that if a product is manually marked up incorrectly it doesn’t have to be sold at that price but what they didn’t realise was that EU online laws are totally different, firstly goods have to be sold at the online price as offered and that each consumer is covered by the long distance selling regulations to where the consumer can return goods for any reason they wish within a 14 day ” cooling off” period unlike in physical stores.

The thousands of complaints were made to the National Consumer Arbitration Board of Spain who ordered the FNAC to deliver the products ordered at the stated online “mistake” price within the full EU online trading guidelines, costing the Company several thousands of pounds losses.

David Hammond the CEO of online trading company www.luxurybritishbeds.com told the Euro Weekly News exclusively the correct processes to online trading across Europe: “You need to be very careful as the trading laws are completely different online, when programming your retail prices you have to ensure they are correct because it’s EU law that you have no option but to accept the retail price offered, you can’t change afterwards, only if the consumer wishes to cancel can you kill the order, it’s a different playing field in retail online than it is in store, all the rights are on the consumers side. www.luxurybritishbeds.com We deliver quality beds all over the EU and have to follow the guidelines very carefully and pricing is paramount, we are just about to launch globally especially into the US market and yet again the laws are different in fact they are more lax than the EU’s ”

As online trading starts to increase in Spain it’s a stark message to get your pricing correct it seems other wise it could cost you thousands as it did for the company Oak Land Furniture Spain who’s head of operations Thomas Wass told the us ” We made a massive blunder once, we listed bedside cabinets at a pound instead of 100 pounds, our IT guy Adam Hughes, finished programming the new range, locked up and went home, in the morning we were hit with 3800 orders for one pound bedside cabinets, we had no option but to supply, thankfully our supplier saw the funny side and as we turned over so much money with them and our Chairman brokered a deal where we had them supplied free but it could have been far worse, we could have been supplying bedsides at far less than they actually cost!”

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