Friday November 24, 2023. Andrés Roda, lawyer from the island of Gran Canaria, takes advantage of the reductions Black Friday to buy an ergonomic office chair through Amazon. The e-commerce giant, number one in the sector, confirms the order. “We will notify you by email when we have an estimated delivery date,” reads the message the company sends that day to the consumer.
After a year, Roda still hasn’t received the chair. Two months after booking, the company canceled the order citing “lack of availability” of a high-cost product. The consumer had not yet made the payment and initially left the matter pending due to his own whirlwind of work. However, a lawyer to whom he had mentioned the matter finally convinced him to file a complaint months later. And the Gran Canaria lawyer has just won a court case against the company founded by tycoon Jeff Bezos. A recent ruling requires 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 order confirmation Black FridayAmazon contacted the customer again on Christmas Eve 2023, a month later, to inform them that shipping had been delayed and to apologize. Already in January, on the 12th, he informed you that he finally had to cancel the order due to the “lack of availability” of the product on his website. However, the consumer accessed the company’s website at that very moment and verified that the chair was still on offer, albeit at a 25% increase from the price it had two months prior. Armed with this information, Roda immediately wrote to the company demanding compliance with the contract and attempting to reach an amicable agreement, but received no response.
It was in July that, following this informal conversation with a lawyer, the lawyer decided to present the lawsuit that had just been approved. In a judgment handed down on October 23, the Court of First Instance number 12 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria found in favor of the consumer and obliged Amazon to execute the contract. That is to say, deliver the chair to your home and at the price stipulated at the time of ordering.
“More than for the chair, of course I love it and I still love it, I filed a complaint because it seems unfair to me that big companies do what they want with the consumer, because of the anger and helplessness that two months after having ordered it, they tell me that there is no longer stock, that they are canceling my order and, at the same time, I see on their page that the product is always available,” says Roda.
In response to questions asked by this newspaper, Amazon limited itself to stating that it was in contact with the customer “to comply with the judgment” and refused to make “additional comments” on the case. In the written response to the lawsuit, company representatives explained that at the time the order was processed, the product was not available, so they tried to “acquire more inventory,” a goal that they did not achieve it “despite their efforts”. ” to get more units, so they decided to cancel the order.
Amazon, which was represented in this proceeding by the Garrigues law firm, claims that after the cancellation it obtained new units, even though the price increased. “The plaintiff never paid the price of the product, therefore the claim for compliance with a contract that has not been formalized is not possible,” defended the lawyer of the e-commerce company in this 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 customer 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 on the market” and depend on the manufacturers.
The judge, however, agrees with the arguments defended by the plaintiff and concludes that in this case the two conditions were met to consider the contract as perfect and, therefore, to demand compliance with it. In other words, the seller had submitted an offer for the product electronically “with an indication of its characteristics and price” and the buyer had accepted the “essential elements” of this product. It is not relevant, in the judge’s opinion, that the consumer did not pay the price of the chair at that time.
“Completing the registration and purchase or online order form that the company has activated on the website in question entails, once sent through the same online channel, the concomitant acceptance of the sale offer , insofar as, in this, except the sending of the aforementioned personal data, the details of the product to be acquired, its characteristics and, fundamentally, its price, its budget and the formalization and contractual perfection are delimited “, explains the judicial resolution in more detail.
The judge also emphasizes that the validity and compliance with contracts “cannot be left to the discretion” of one of the parties, so that the sale price proposed by Amazon “is binding”. “If the offer was incorrect, this is not attributable to the buyer, but to the seller herself,” he says.
Gift voucher
After Andrés Roda filed a lawsuit, Amazon offered him a gift certificate for the difference between the price of the product when he tried to buy it and the price it was then, 25% higher. The company then defended that it was doing so “following the customer orientation policy” and as a “simple commercial gesture”, without this implying “an admission of guilt”.
The lawyer rejected this gift voucher for the simple reason that Amazon no longer distributes this ergonomic chair in the Canary Islands. “This product cannot be shipped to the shipping address you provided. Choose another delivery 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 receive red letters that do not allow me to make the purchase”, explains Roda. A reality that Canarian citizens have suffered for years with e-commerce, with products that are not available for the archipelago due to the additional transport costs due to the distance and also due to the additional bureaucracy linked to the fiscal particularities of this community “This seems to me to be discrimination compared to the rest. of Spanish consumers”, declares the lawyer from Gran Canaria.
The sentence is final and must now be carried out. Andrés Roda is trying to do his part. In other words, pay for the product. Given the impossibility of doing this through the Amazon website because the product is not available for the Canary Islands, they asked the company for an account number to make the transfer. So far, they haven’t given it to them. From next Tuesday, as he explains, he will be able to take legal action to request this number from the court and, in return, for Jeff Bezos’ company to give him the chair.
The law firm representing Amazon has written to you to say that it is taking “all possible steps to move the process forward” and that the company’s intention is to “voluntarily comply with the decision.”
