dabs.com foul up - please help

Cyrus

Thats fair enough

to be honest my interest in this case is more to do with my studies of law than anything else,

if Dabs were to have a case against this man it basically turns all caselaw to date on the sale of goods act on its head!

slave1

nice to see both sides of the story
if Chief is profiting by selling on then his story needs to be viewed in a different light
interesting thread, at the end of the day equity should rule
keep the most expensive product and return the rest
dabs, you need tighter process control
Chief, just like the cougher on WWTBAM, you'd have got away with it if greed didn't set in

The Brigadier

Ethically you should return the goods.

They made an error, you know they made an error and yet you still went ahead.

Just because they are a PLC doesn't mitigate this fact...

spongebob

Hummmmmm saw the Reg .

If the items were B2B and not B2C and for eventual resale I would change my overall opinion as well .

If they were B2B but for the Purchasers own use I would not .

The reason is simple, Dabs are a large purchaser and would have a much better idea than a small company as to what was being discontinued by large manufacturers....such as that Sony PDA where Sony announced a few days back that they were discontinuing PDA's in the EU . Punting them down channel at full price is not on.

Hope for a bit of clarifcation on all that TBH ...and not just from Dabs either .

I have always found Dabs to be OK to deal with, top 10-20% of etailers consistently .....bar their ludicrous shipping charges to Ireland .

As an aside I would strongly advise them to take a Commercial forum here as Komplett and Elara have done. While these can get rough at times the long term benefits are immeasurable given the obvious committment shown to their Irish customer base by those companies.

M

spongebob

One other subtle but important distinction here.

1. Is Chief a Business who is a customer

or

2. Is Chief a Business customer

1. Pays immediately while 2. gets 30 days credit, has a credit limit at Dabs , and has supplied Trade Refs and Banking Refs to get to be a 2.

To my mind 1. is a Consumer like the rest of us , except that they can get VAT back, while 2. is the kind of Business Customer that Dabs has been describing in their rebuttal.

Clarification would be appreciated.

M

jwall

Thanks for the comments and I will have a look and see how some of our competitors address this Forum. We do actively participate on Forums in UK and France and the Irish market is certainly one that we enjoy working in.

With regards to our pricing I can agree with you that we need to look at this but we have an internal issue with Multiple carriers and our Logistics Centre. We are working on this and expect to have a solution to this by Q3 this year and we will then readdress carriage pricing. We currently just Breakeven on our carriage account to Ireland.

The majority of the items in question and most of the value of the order were Twenty Sony Port Replicators for a Vaio so not something you would think could be used by one end user.

Also whilst we are a PLC, we are still a privately owned company and not a listed PLC. (someone mentioned this in an earlier thread).

Jonathan Wall
dabs.com plc

jwall

Sorry was posting my reply as you were adding the next bit.

Customer in question has a business account with a trade pricing account but not a credit account. Due to credit insurance issues (not related to said customer) we can't open credit accounts outside of the UK currently.

The reason the customer saw these pricing was because our trade pricing system discounts our margin depending on spend and our system had incorrectly set the buy price to £0.10 and £0.00. Normal consumer customers would not have seen these pricing. We do normally have controls on thsi and don't allow items to show at a loss but as anyone who understands databases no matter how much controls you put in place things do go wrong occasionally.

Jonathan

KdjaCL

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/11/dabs_pricing/

on the reg for those who havent seen it.

kdjac

The Brigadier

Chief......hang your head in shame...

You knowingly took advantage of someone elses mistake.

To put a human side on this...it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the human at the end of this error may end up facing disciplinary procedures...

spongebob

Ah OK, he is a TRADE customer.

I see . That is a different ballgame to Consumer Rights with entirely separate and implicitly (or explicitly) mutual obligations between the parties .

PM the username Devore or the username Vexorg about the Commercial Board, they are great for kyboshing this kinda ' issue' before it gets to le Reg .

M

seamus

Originally posted by Muck
Hummmmmm saw the Reg .

If the items were B2B and not B2C and for eventual resale I would change my overall opinion as well .

Me too, but only in the ethical sense. If Chief were to return 50% of the cost of the goods, a goodwill compromise if you will, he still stands to make a handsome profit on the items.

But I don't see any reason why he must, or should. I assumed the law was the same for B2B trading as it is for B2C trading, with the exception of VAT and invoicing. Maybe I'm wrong?

Raskolnikov

Originally posted by The Brigadier
Chief......hang your head in shame...

You knowingly took advantage of someone elses mistake.

To put a human side on this...it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the human at the end of this error may end up facing disciplinary procedures...

I must say I echo this opinion. Someone will undoubtedly have to pay for this mistake, wether it's a dabs.com employee getting sacked or price hikes, someone will suffer because of this. komplett were really hurt the last time it made an error like this.

dabs.com are offering to even cover your expenses in sending the goods back, they're even willing to let customers who bought one item off the hook. By shafting a buyer like this, you're hardly inspiring confidence in Point to Point IT Ltd are you?

As a side note to the dabs guy, the €35 surcharge on delivery of items to Ireland is ridiculous.

DMT

By refusing to send the two remaining items, which have been charged for, dabs are breaking their contract with Chief and are effectively commiting fraud.

Chief

Hello folks

The account I have (had?) along with my business partner with dabs is a business account, I would love to know what percentage discount we actually get because as far as we can see it's a £1 here and a penny there. Everything that was purchased except for the port replicators are for our use and not for resale. The only reason we ordered the sony port replicators was because they were cheap and there was a bunch of them in the clearance corner, we just thought it was a good bargain. We actually have no idea what we are even going to do with them, we don't even sell sony laptops, it's all acer, hp & compaq and I know no-one who has a sony laptop. We are 2 techies who run a very small business which just about pays our wages every week. We are constantly looking for good deals from suppliers and thought that it was just a bargain we had found in the clearance corner. When we ordered them we didn't realise their true value, it wasn't until the things arrived and the who_ha started. Dabs may think that we set out with the intention to make a fast buck, that wasn't the case. We saw cheap stuff and ordered it, Who would not have done the same?

|Chief|

The Brigadier

Yes, but you now know the true value of the items..

You know a mistake was made. Dabs have offerered to cover your expenses, yet you want to take this crusade?

jwall

Chief,

Trying to contact you for an amicable solution but no response to your phone or email. Please can you pick your email or phone message up and give me a call.

Thanks
Jonathan

Vexorg

It strikes me that if you dont really know what you are going to do with all the prt replicators, and now that Dabs have put their hands up and said they made an error with the pricing, the most reasonable solution would be to return the items at Dabs expense seeing as how it was their pricing error that started the issue:)

If you mis priced an item sold to a business customer of yours and were out of pocket as a result, would you not try to get the item or the difference in cost back from them? I know that I would certainly try.

Let us know how this goes anyway....


V.

DMT

The question I want to know the answer to is, if dabs had overpriced an item and someone had bought it, would dabs be so quick to refund the customer the difference as they are to reclaim lost profits from underpricing?

Somehow, I don't think so...

jwall

Yes absolutely we would refund it without question. In business you are either ethical or not and I would like to think we are totally ethical.

Jonathan Wall
dabs.com plc

zAbbo

just do what elara.ie did, recharge ur card and send some bleh email about undercharging

secret_squirrel

I think you may have slightly misled us chiefy - legally you *might* be in the right. Morally I'm not sure you are.

Jwall - fair play to you coming on here and putting your side of the story. Its restored the confidence I had in dabs before I started reading this thread....

sceptre

Originally posted by secret_squirrel
I think you may have slightly misled us chiefy - legally you *might* be in the right. Morally I'm not sure you are.

Legally he's still covered under the completed contract. No benefit under the Sales of Goods Acts and any other consumer protection mentioned by anyone though.

Morally, well, that's up to yourselves (individually) really so I've little to say there. It's not as though I'm a moral void but I'm not in a convincing mood.

Jonathan, from what I've seen as an ordinary user of boards.ie, the retailers who've secured a commercial interaction forum have gained quite a few customers, quite a few repeat customers and quite a lot of customer loyalty by having this (pretty cheap) forum available to them.

Chief, 20 port replicators, good lord.

I'm inclined to say, given the two changes (or clarifications really, no-one was lying) in the story, that Chief and dabs should really sort something mutually amicable. Given that you're both suddenly businesses, unfortunately you'll probably both lose out on a bit of PR and goodwill if you don't. Sort out something so you're both (kind of) ahead.

jesus_thats_gre

Originally posted by Chief
They just emailed back.. being a little more threatening.. maybe I should just ignore them completely...


Dear Mr ********,

Please confirm by return as to which option you wish to take from the below.

a) - Return all the goods for a refund on return
b) - Pay the full price of the goods
c) - Take this matter to court (cost & expenses will be applied for)

I am sorry if this seems strict, but we believe that you have taken advantage of an error, and buying items worth over £100.00 for 11p is an obvious error, which you proceeded to take advantage off by adding more items for this un-realistic price.

---

****** ******
Customer Services Manager
dabs.com plc
www.dabs.com

Email: ********@dabs.com

This was not a very smart email at all... In my opinion, point C is largely responsible fo this been dragged out so much and Chief digging his heals in... Its blatantly obvious that Chief has no legal obligation to Dabs with relation to this order and for a Customer Services Manager to send such an arrogant email is extremely silly.

Why not come to some arrangement with Chief. Maybe if Chief was to return the goods (that he admits he has no use for) you could offer him something of a fractional value that he may consider useful or actually want. Seeing he admits to having no use for them and that be bought them purely because they were so cheap, there is no benefit to Chief in paying say 50% of the difference. If you get me...

Chief

Jonathan, In all honesty this could probably have been prevented by a phonecall from yourself in the beginning. The impersonal and threatening nature of the emails did annoy us. But, after listening to the others thoughts and opinions on boards and after deliberating amongst ourselves we've decided we would like to sort this out amicably. Dabs can collect all the sony port replicators from us. All we ask in return is that you allow us to keep the other items, send us out the second pda that was missing from the order and unfreeze our account. We think this is only fair as you have already stated that Dabs allowed their other business customers, who ordered less items than ourselves to keep their orders without any fuss. We really don't want anyone to lose their job over this error and we do not want other customers to have to foot the bill. We hope you find this offer acceptable. Our apologies if we were unreachable, we were on a call-out on for much of Friday.

My apologies if anyone felt misled by my post, I was just in need of a little help as we had no idea what to do.

|Chief|

spongebob

Originally posted by Chief
Jonathan, In all honesty this could probably have been prevented by a phonecall from yourself in the beginning. The impersonal and threatening nature of the emails did annoy us. But, after listening to the others thoughts and opinions on boards and after deliberating amongst ourselves we've decided we would like to sort this out amicably.

Good stuff Chief. The legalese in the initial Dabs communications was OTT , tantamount to bullying .

Jonathan did Dabs no harm and it seems as if an amicable solution can be reached . I trust that Jonathan will confirm that all is as was once the port replicators come back into stock.

Again, I would stress that this is the kind of incident that can be defused (before the Reg gets it) through a Commercial Board.

Komplett have weathered many a storm but their overall reputation is intact . Once the lawyers get their noses in the trough then everybody has failed . Even going quasi legal is a serious CS systems failure.

M

jwall

An amicable agreement has been agreed on this for all parties and as suggested by an earlier post Dabs has agreed to allow 'Chief' to keep the kit that he had a use for and allowed Dabs to collect the 'unwanted' port replicators.

Thanks for all the constructive comments in this thread and at the end of the day we totally realise that this was our fault in the first place and we need to make sure these issues don't happen in the first place.

On a separate topic hopefully early in the Autumn we will be able to announce new lower shipping charges to Eire but in the meantime thanks for your continued business.

Jonathan Wall
dabs.com plc

spongebob

Originally posted by jwall
new lower shipping charges to Eire but in the meantime thanks for your continued business.

ÉIRE only ever existed as a stamp identifier from the early 1920's , the name of the state was then the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) . As we have lived in the Republic of Ireland since 1948 it would be more helpful to organise a decent shipping rate for same.

One cannot physically ship to what is in effect a philatelic concept and not a country.

TIA

M

seamus

Originally posted by Muck
ÉIRE only ever existed as a stamp identifier from the early 1920's , the name of the state was then the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) . As we have lived in the Republic of Ireland since 1948 it would be more helpful to organise a decent shipping rate for same.

One cannot physically ship to what is in effect a philatelic concept and not a country.

TIA

M

Let's not be pedantic here Muck

From Bunreacht na hEireann
Article 4
The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland.

Although the idea of Éire is a concept, it's still quite possible to ship stuff there, since the concept relates to real places.

DMT

Originally posted by Muck
ÉIRE only ever existed as a stamp identifier from the early 1920's , the name of the state was then the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) . As we have lived in the Republic of Ireland since 1948 it would be more helpful to organise a decent shipping rate for same.

I'm sorry to disappoint you Muck, but Article 4 of the constitution disagrees with you:

Article 4

The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland.

The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 merely allows for the use of "Republc of Ireland" as the offical name of the country, in addition to those in the constitution (and a few other things like repeal of the Executive Authority (external relations) Act 1936)

ballooba

Originally posted by jwall
On a separate topic hopefully early in the Autumn we will be able to announce new lower shipping charges to Eire but in the meantime thanks for your continued business.

Not sure about the reasons given above but the use of the term Eire is offensive to a lot of Irish people.

Calling it ireland would be a good way to avoid this problem (unless of course you are taking the p:ss).