A spectacular sale on the Homebase website was the prompt Andrew Mills needed to refurbish his conservatory. A sofa that had been selling for £599 was on offer at just £120, and on top of that the retailer was offering shoppers who spent more than £100 another £100 off. At the end of April Mills ordered two, paid £140 and was promised delivery in late June.
“Ten days before the delivery date I got rid of my old suite, ripped the skirtings off and bought some new flooring in readiness for the new furniture,” he says. But four days before it was due to arrive at his home in Beverley, East Yorkshire, a text message told him the order could not be fulfilled. It added that as no alternatives were available his money had been refunded. “I rang customer services who basically said ‘hard luck’,” he says. “I then emailed pointing out that it was unreasonable to state that they couldn’t source any alternatives as they currently had 578 sofas for sale at full price online. The next day sofas no longer featured on their website.”
Mills is one of hundreds of customers who took advantage of a sale which offered a £100 discount on top of price cuts of up to 75%, and he is not alone in being disappointed. “I have been reading various forums regarding this whole sorry saga and would guess that there are hundreds in a similar predicament,”
Another Cash reader, Helen Newbitt of Liskeard in Cornwall, is one. She paid £360 for three sofas and an armchair for her living room in the April sale, and was given a delivery date of 21 June. A week before the consignment was due she received a text saying the date had been put back to 30 June. “We got rid of our old sofas and waited in all day, but the delivery never turned up,” she says. “I phoned customer services who said they couldn’t confirm when it would arrive and promised a manager would call me within two hours. That didn’t happen either.”
She complained via Homebase’s Facebook page and was told that customer services was awaiting an update on her order status and would then book in a delivery. She has yet to be officially informed that the order has in fact been refunded.
Unlike Newbitt and Mills, some customers only discovered they would not receive their order when their delivery failed to turn up and they noticed a refund from Homebase on their bank statements. Many disappointed customers claim to be out of pocket after disposing of old suites or redecorating their homes in expectation of bargain sofas that never turned up. For some, alternatives from other stores are not an affordable option.
However, Homebase is refusing to offer compensation for associated expenses and has a get-out clause in its terms and conditions which states that a binding contract between the store and the customer is only formed when the goods are dispatched.
Homebase told The Observer that a “software glitch” had allowed mass orders to be processed after stock had run low. In an email sent to one frustrated customer it said that it accepted orders “in good faith” as it was expecting more stock, but that its supplier could not meet the high demand.
Its failure to warn purchasers, some of whom were given new delivery dates after their orders had been cancelled without notification, was, it told The Observer, “because we are currently reliant on a third party to help manage customer service inquiries and are taking urgent steps to improve this process, although there is still more to be done”.
Peter Khurana of Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, has started a petition to shame Homebase into compensating customers. He was offered an alternative sofa and armchair by the retailer when his original order was cancelled five weeks after it was placed. He was then told that the alternative was also unavailable. Khurana claims that Homebase changed the name of one sofa and told customers whose orders had been cancelled that it wasn’t the same type they had ordered, even though it was identical. Homebase declined to comment on the allegation.
History is littered with too-good-to-be true deals which have backfired on retailers. In 2009 a group of customers successfully sued B&Q for “loss of bargain” after it failed to honour orders for dishwashers offered at £100 in a sale. Seven years earlier, Kodak was dragged through the courts when customers were told that the £100 cameras they had ordered had been mis-priced.
The Homebase fiasco comes after the DIY chain was bought in a £340m deal by the Australian retail giant Wesfarmers. In March, within a week of the takeover, the new owner sacked Homebase’s entire senior management team. At the time, Neil Saunders, managing director of influential UK retail research agency Conlumino, questioned the wisdom of a purge before the Australian company had had time to experience first-hand the UK’s £38bn home improvements market. “On the surface retail in a foreign country can seem obvious and easy. In reality it never is. There are nuances and hidden traps,” he tweeted.
It would seem that the sofa sale was one such trap. Wesfarmers, which plans to rebrand Homebase as Bunnings, is axing home furnishings to concentrate on DIY and light commercial supplies, and removed the section from it website last month. It declines to comment on speculation that the striking bargains offered in the April deal were an attempt to offload remaining stock.
The company insists that it has done everything in its power to help affected customers. “As soon as the issue came to light, we took immediate action to rectify the problem and contact all of the customers involved,” Wesfarmers says in a statement. “We are very disappointed to have let customers down and would like to offer our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused. At this point, we have managed to contact all but a handful of customers to offer a refund or suitable alternative.” It declines to answer when it discovered the software problem, how many customers have had their orders cancelled, or how many have successfully been offered alternatives.
Neither can it reassure customers who are still awaiting delivery, uncertain whether their furniture will arrive or not. Newbitt’s family currently spend their evenings sitting on the living room floor. “I’m reluctant to order sofas from somewhere else in case the Homebase order turns up and they debit the money again,” she says. “I was so excited by the bargain I was getting at the time, but I’ve learned the hard way that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
Know your rights
Under contract law, goods sold in a shop or online are an “invitation to treat” rather than an offer to sell, a distinction which protects retailers if they mis-price an item or find they cannot fulfil an order. They only become legally bound to a transaction when a contract is formed and, with online purchases, the precise moment that happens is usually buried in the small print sent with the order confirmation.
Citizens Advice says that if a trader’s terms and conditions state that the contract is formed upon dispatch of goods, any notice confirming an order is not legally binding, even if a payment for it has been taken. Customers are therefore entitled only to a refund of the purchase price and delivery cost if the trader cancels. According to consumer law expert Andrew Leakey, anyone who has taken a day off work to receive a delivery that never came may be able to claim loss of earnings, but “loss of bargain” is far trickier to argue in a court.
“There is an argument that a customer is entitled to damages for breach of contract - this would be the increased cost of buying the same sofa outside the sale,” he says. “However, it is very difficult to identify and purchase exactly the equivalent sofa. A retailer will always argue that any more expensive alternatives are pricier because of different construction or material.”
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