Friday, November 24, 2023. Andrés Roda, a lawyer from the island of Gran Canaria, takes advantage of the discounts of the Black Friday to purchase an ergonomic office chair through Amazon. The e-commerce giant, number one in the sector, confirms the order. “We will inform you by e-mail when we have an estimated delivery date,” reads the message that the company sends that day to the consumer.
After a year, Roda still has not received the chair. Two months after the reservation, the company canceled the order citing “lack of availability” of a product that has a high cost. The consumer had not yet made the payment and, at first, left the matter on hold due to his own whirlwind of work. However, a solicitor to whom he had mentioned the case ended up convincing him to sue months later. And the Gran Canaria lawyer has just won in court against the company founded by tycoon Jeff Bezos. A recent ruling forces Amazon to deliver a chair to your home, which it also no longer sends to the Islands due to transportation costs.
The sequence of events was as follows. After confirmation of the order the same Black FridayAmazon contacted the customer again on Christmas Eve 2023, just a month later, to inform him that the shipment had been delayed and apologize. Already in January, on the 12th, he informed you that he had finally had to cancel the order due to “lack of availability” of the product on his website. However, the consumer accessed the company’s website at that precise moment and verified that the chair was still being offered, although with a 25% increase over the price it had two months before. With this information, Roda immediately wrote to the company to demand compliance with the contract and try to reach an out-of-court agreement, but received no response.
It is in July when, as a result of that informal conversation with a solicitor, the lawyer decides to present the lawsuit that has just been approved. In a ruling handed down on October 23, the Court of First Instance number 12 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria agrees with the consumer and forces Amazon to fulfill the contract. That is, to deliver the chair to your home and at the price stipulated at the time of the order.
“More than for the chair, of course I love it and I still love it, I sued because it seems unfair to me that large companies do whatever they want with the consumer, because of the anger and helplessness that two months after ordering it they tell me that there is no longer stock, that they cancel my order and, at the same time, I see on their page that the product is still available,” explains Roda.
In response to questions posed by this newspaper, Amazon has limited itself to stating that it is in contact with the client “to comply with the ruling” and has declined to make “additional comments” on the case. In the written response to the lawsuit, the company representatives explained that at the time of processing the order there was no availability of the product, so they tried to “acquire more inventory”, an objective that they did not achieve “despite their efforts.” to get more units, so they decided to cancel the order.
Amazon, which was represented in this procedure by the Garrigues law firm, maintains that after the cancellation it obtained new units, although the price increased. “The plaintiff never paid the price of the product, so the claim for compliance with a contract that was not formalized is not possible,” the lawyer for the e-commerce company defended in that letter.
The legal discussion in this case focused on determining the validity and effectiveness of the contract between Amazon and the consumer. The company maintained that it had fulfilled its obligation to inform the client that the contracted good was not available and to return what he had paid. Regarding the increase in the price of the chair, he defended that these variations are “frequent in the market” and depend on the manufacturers.
The judge, however, aligns herself with the arguments defended by the plaintiff and concludes that in this case the two requirements were met to consider the contract perfected and, therefore, to demand its compliance. That is, the seller had submitted an offer for the product electronically “with an indication of its characteristics and price” and that the buyer had accepted the “essential elements” of that product. It is not relevant, in the judge’s opinion, that the consumer had not paid the price of the chair at that time.
“The completion of the registration and purchase or online order form that the company has enabled on the website in question entails, once sent to it in the same online channel, the concurrent acceptance of the offer of sale, insofar as In it, apart from the consignment of the aforementioned personal data, the details of the product to be acquired, its characteristics and, fundamentally, its price, budget and the formalization and contractual perfection are delimited,” the resolution explains in more detail. judicial.
The judge also emphasizes that the validity and compliance of the contracts “cannot be left to the discretion” of one of the parties, so the sale price offered by Amazon “is binding.” “If the offer was erroneous, it is not attributable to the purchasing party, but to the seller herself,” he maintains.
Gift voucher
After Andrés Roda filed the lawsuit, Amazon offered him a gift voucher for the difference between the price of the product when he tried to buy it and the price he had then, 25% higher. The company then defended that it was doing so “following the customer orientation policy” and as a “mere commercial gesture”, without this implying “an acknowledgment of guilt”.
The lawyer rejected that gift voucher for the simple reason that Amazon no longer distributes that ergonomic chair in the Canary Islands. “This product cannot be shipped to the shipping address you have indicated. Choose another shipping address”, appears in red letters on the e-commerce portal when you try to make the purchase.
“The gift voucher is very good. The problem is that they don’t bring it to me, that I get red letters that don’t let me make the purchase,” says Roda. A reality that Canarian citizens have been suffering for years with electronic commerce, with products that are not available for the archipelago due to the extra transportation costs due to the distance and also due to the additional bureaucracy linked to the tax particularities of this community. “It seems like discrimination to me with respect to the rest of the consumers in Spain,” says the Gran Canaria lawyer.
The sentence is final and now it must be executed. Andrés Roda is trying to do his part. That is, pay for the product. Given the impossibility of being able to do it through the Amazon website as the product is not available for the Canary Islands, they have asked the company for an account number to make the transfer. At the moment, they have not given it to them. Starting next Tuesday, as he explains, he can file an execution lawsuit to request that number through the court and, in turn, for Jeff Bezos’ company to give him the chair.
The law firm that represents Amazon has written to tell you that they are taking “all possible steps to move forward with the process” and that the company’s intention is to “voluntarily comply with the ruling.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
