Oh, they will try ( I'm looking at you, Dell), but you can quite easily stick by your guns and refuse to accept anything other than product delivery. If they have taken your money they have to provide the goods or an appropriate replacement.
If they keep refusing you can start reporting them to various authorities such as ACCC and they start wearing penalties and have to deliver anyway.
Under German law, I think HP would have been fine. I think the important part is that (apparently) HP made a mistake when they put out that special offer. Whether or not a customer should be able to recognize it as such is secondary.
How quickly? What if the defect with the laptop isn't readily apparent and this is because the company has intentionally crafted their product in such a way so that the defect doesn't reveal itself to the customer until after the legally mandated warranty/return period?
Then you have to ask the seller to repair it for up to 2 years (1 year the manufacturer has to prove you destroyed the device if he does not want to repair it, 2 year you have to prove that's it's a manufacturing defect)
After 3 attempts, they have to give you your money back.
If the product is actually defect, you can return it even after the 14 days are over. With electronic devices, manufacturers must provide a mandatory warranty of two years.
That depends, did you buy it online? Then you can return the laptop basically no question asked for 14 days. There are some exceptions for custom orders, but I have never seen those enforced for anything not majorly custom build.
Offline you do not have this right, but a lot of retailers still have money back/voucher guarantees for 14 days.
Take this with a grain of salt, the law is pretty old in Germany and I have heard different things why it was introduced. Also the eu directive is lot newer.
- you can try things out in a shop, you can't online
- it comes from door salesman
Which liked to pressure people into buying stuff
- was extended to support local businesses as an added cost to sell online
>Could Lands End have kept its lifetime return policy in Germany under this law?
Don't know about that policy/any details, but sure.. why not?
Laws only define a minimum, not a maximum service level
I'm not sure about Germany. In the US, probably. It's not usually laws as much as stores having very generous return policies. To be fair, this was in the UK, so customs and laws are different.
Under Russian law, too. IIRC you must sell the item at the price you displayed even if it's wrong. You can add an * and thousands of words of small print though.
There's a good summary for the US here [1]. The most relevant parts:
> Assuming that an incorrect advertised price is truly an error rather than an attempt to deceive, companies are only obligated to honor it if a customer makes an offer at that price and the company accepts it. This exchange creates a contract between buyer and seller.
> In a store, customers make an offer simply by indicating they want to buy an item – for example, by bringing it up to the register – and the company accepts the offer by ringing up the sale. In the brick-and-mortar world, contracts don't get formed around pricing errors because the store just won't ring up the sale. But online selling, in which transactions are processed automatically, has added a new layer of complexity to the issue.
and
> When an e-commerce website has had an incorrect price entered into its database, it can end up not only advertising that price but also accepting orders and charging customers' credit cards for that amount. The central issue here is whether retailers can void the contract created when orders were accepted.
> The easiest way for a company to deal with such situations is to have website "terms of use" that clearly state the company can cancel orders and refund customers' money because of pricing errors (or for any reason). Otherwise, a common law doctrine known as "unilateral mistake of fact" applies. This doctrine allows a party to a contract to set aside the contract if honoring it would be "unconscionable," or if the other party could have reasonably assumed it was a mistake. A $1,000 item advertised for $10 likely would meet this definition.
