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The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details: https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is$300$250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
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Bad Smoky Mountain Knife Works - Bad Experience/Website orders not being honored
- Thread starter Steelhog
- Start date
Gastonknife
Gold Member
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- Dec 15, 2008
- Messages
- 1,995
Ok, against my own advice I'll try one more time
The second part of that statute only applies if the first part - INTENT - is proven/a fact . That's why it proceeds that . How can you not get that?
If you don't have part A, then part B is irrelevant.
Ugh .
If you have an example of where you took legal action and got a retailer to be required to sell you a $1000 item for $1 because they made an honest mistake listing it, then please feel free to share.
I have worked for and still work for one of the larger online retailers around. Not the bay and not the river, but we are quite large to say the least.
Ive been there 12 years and have seen this exact scenario play out many times.
Before we added into our terms of business that mistake prices are mistakes and mistakes happen, and when they do we reserve the right to cancel orders based of mistakes and pricing errors, we did legally have to send stuff.
Once we added that to our terms of service, we were covered by that.
Now that being said, its a customer service issue or customer retention issue at that point whether or not you will fulfill the order.
We sell benchmade too, and had we made this error, that difference in price is lower than our threshold to lose a customer over, so we would suck it up and hopefully learn from our listing error.
A lot of it also matters on if we caught the error before items shipped.
It lots of orders already shipped, we are more inclined to let those go and not create poor customer relation over a few bucks.
If we catch the mistake before orders ship, and its a substantial difference, we will cancel the order and email the customer and apology and a reason why, and we will typically give some sort of hookup for the mistake.
On the other hand, i see customers really trying to stick it to us as well, so many times these so called valued customers we want to keep happy could care less about us retailers. If there is an obvious pricing error on the site, i cant tell you how many people will order 20 of them. Now you know damn well that person knows its an error, and they could care less about us as a retailer, but yet they claim to love us etc etc. Those people are also the first to put up a huge fight and say how we are just hosing the customer. Pretty ironic.
As stated, customers are quite fickle, and will go with any of the other hundreds of retailers out there, so it is how situations are handled in the end that matters if you want customers coming back.
Internet customers are tough, and you can see by replies in this thread what a tough road it is for internet sales. Its very tough.
People are waiting at the gallows with ropes.
So many customers are looking to crucify online retailers and so many just plain forget the golden rule of life. Treat others how you would like to be treated.
Mistakes happen.
Customers enter incorrect addresses. Guess what, thats a mistake on the customers end, but we eat that order and send out a new one.
If we didnt, we are horrible for not fixing the mistske the customer made, and they go on social media and blast us for their mistake.
Its a tough tough crowd guys.
I also see so many customers that use the phrase, we love you guys and you are the best retailer and we only like shopping with you, so you better take care of this issue.
Well if you love us so much, why do you want us to lose thousands and thousands of dollars shipping this mistake to you? That will hurt our business a lot. The people that love us the most try and cripple us the most, its odd.
Its very tough to find and keep loyal online customers, they all want to save a dollar.
In the end though, they should have emails customers if the issue was caught before shipping.
If it wasnt, then at the very least a free return label should have been sent out.
It is garbage if they didnt offer free retun shipping.
Ive been there 12 years and have seen this exact scenario play out many times.
Before we added into our terms of business that mistake prices are mistakes and mistakes happen, and when they do we reserve the right to cancel orders based of mistakes and pricing errors, we did legally have to send stuff.
Once we added that to our terms of service, we were covered by that.
Now that being said, its a customer service issue or customer retention issue at that point whether or not you will fulfill the order.
We sell benchmade too, and had we made this error, that difference in price is lower than our threshold to lose a customer over, so we would suck it up and hopefully learn from our listing error.
A lot of it also matters on if we caught the error before items shipped.
It lots of orders already shipped, we are more inclined to let those go and not create poor customer relation over a few bucks.
If we catch the mistake before orders ship, and its a substantial difference, we will cancel the order and email the customer and apology and a reason why, and we will typically give some sort of hookup for the mistake.
On the other hand, i see customers really trying to stick it to us as well, so many times these so called valued customers we want to keep happy could care less about us retailers. If there is an obvious pricing error on the site, i cant tell you how many people will order 20 of them. Now you know damn well that person knows its an error, and they could care less about us as a retailer, but yet they claim to love us etc etc. Those people are also the first to put up a huge fight and say how we are just hosing the customer. Pretty ironic.
As stated, customers are quite fickle, and will go with any of the other hundreds of retailers out there, so it is how situations are handled in the end that matters if you want customers coming back.
Internet customers are tough, and you can see by replies in this thread what a tough road it is for internet sales. Its very tough.
People are waiting at the gallows with ropes.
So many customers are looking to crucify online retailers and so many just plain forget the golden rule of life. Treat others how you would like to be treated.
Mistakes happen.
Customers enter incorrect addresses. Guess what, thats a mistake on the customers end, but we eat that order and send out a new one.
If we didnt, we are horrible for not fixing the mistske the customer made, and they go on social media and blast us for their mistake.
Its a tough tough crowd guys.
I also see so many customers that use the phrase, we love you guys and you are the best retailer and we only like shopping with you, so you better take care of this issue.
Well if you love us so much, why do you want us to lose thousands and thousands of dollars shipping this mistake to you? That will hurt our business a lot. The people that love us the most try and cripple us the most, its odd.
Its very tough to find and keep loyal online customers, they all want to save a dollar.
In the end though, they should have emails customers if the issue was caught before shipping.
If it wasnt, then at the very least a free return label should have been sent out.
It is garbage if they didnt offer free retun shipping.
Not quite. The second part states that simply refusing to sell a good as advertised is prima facie evidence of a violation (intent) of that subsection of the code. In other words if "part B" occurred, it is prima facie evidence of a guilt/violation of "part A".Ok, against my own advice I'll try one more time
The second part of that statute only applies if the first part - INTENT - is proven/a fact . That's why it proceeds that . How can you not get that?
If you don't have part A, then part B is irrelevant.
Ugh .
If you have an example of where you took legal action and got a retailer to be required to sell you a $1000 item for $1 because they made an honest mistake listing it, then please feel free to share.
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Don't waste any more of your time and brain cells on this. Not worth it.Ok, against my own advice I'll try one more time
The second part of that statute only applies if the first part - INTENT - is proven/a fact . That's why it proceeds that . How can you not get that?
If you don't have part A, then part B is irrelevant.
Ugh .
If you have an example of where you took legal action and got a retailer to be required to sell you a $1000 item for $1 because they made an honest mistake listing it, then please feel free to share.
That's the thing, trust. This is not the first time smkw has done this. After the price mix up they pulled on me they lost my trust. There are so many dealers, there is no reason to use one you don't trust. Then there is the way they handled their mistake here. It's just bad business. But watch, they are probably reading this. And just like when you got their attention when you left a one star review, because of this thread you will get reimbursed shipping. Good businesses do the right thing from the beginning, not just when they are called out.
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2013
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- 1,987
If it’s a bona fide mistake, there’s no liability.
I preordered a Vtoku2 Stretch on 1/4/18 (yes 2018) from SMKW. I saw this week they were in and advertised on their site. Later that day they were sold out. Having not gotten any information on my preorder, I called.
First person I talked to I explained my situation that I had pre-ordered a knife from last year and saw it was sold out so I wanted to see if there was tracking on my order.
Person on the phone asked for my order number which I started to give and then was immediately yelled at to STOP and instead asked for my ZIP Code and last name. Even though I had the order number handy.
Was basically told that they didn’t know when my order was going to ship but that it had been pulled. Then was told I was being transferred to customer service which seemed weird because who was I to (?) and essentially got the same answer...then two days later today I got the tracking finally.
It’s not their fault that the knife was on pre-order for so long but my general impression is that they just don’t seem to have it together. Was my first time ordering from them and honestly probably my last.
First person I talked to I explained my situation that I had pre-ordered a knife from last year and saw it was sold out so I wanted to see if there was tracking on my order.
Person on the phone asked for my order number which I started to give and then was immediately yelled at to STOP and instead asked for my ZIP Code and last name. Even though I had the order number handy.
Was basically told that they didn’t know when my order was going to ship but that it had been pulled. Then was told I was being transferred to customer service which seemed weird because who was I to (?) and essentially got the same answer...then two days later today I got the tracking finally.
It’s not their fault that the knife was on pre-order for so long but my general impression is that they just don’t seem to have it together. Was my first time ordering from them and honestly probably my last.
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- Feb 28, 2011
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- 27,444
Do you understand what prima facie evidence means? Serious question, because you keep repeating it as though it helps your point when it really doesn't.
It is evidence that "on its face" or "at first sight" is enough to prove guilt. Prima facie evidence can be refuted and often is; however, as I said in an earlier post, a retailer will have difficulty refuting this if that retailer, without previously notifying the buyer, provides a product inferior to the one it advertised. That is what SMKW did in this case, and has apparently done before.
pri·ma fa·ci·e
/ˌprīmə ˈfāSHē/
adjective & adverb
Law
adjective: prima facie; adverb: prima facie
- based on the first impression; accepted as correct until proved otherwise.
"a prima facie case of professional misconduct"
prima facie
: (pry-mah fay-shah) adj. Latin for "at first look," or "on its face," referring to a lawsuit or criminal prosecution in which the evidence before trial is sufficient to prove the case unless there is substantial contradictory evidence presented at trial. A prima facie case presented to a Grand Jury by the prosecution will result in an indictment. Example: in a charge of bad check writing, evidence of a half dozen checks written on a non-existent bank account makes it a prima facie case. However, proof that the bank had misprinted the account number on the checks might disprove the prosecution's apparent "open and shut" case.
Regardless, it's moot as the code I cited is in in the VA Code and SMKW isn't in VA. I cited it because I was told I was incorrect in my statement that "If it were a brick and mortar store here, they would have to honor the better product at the cheaper price. It's the law. Thought it was so everywhere in the USA.
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Your statement was not correct, which is why folks have challenged it. In VA, as is likely the case everywhere (I’m not reading 50 statutes to confirm), as long as the lower price was posted in error, the vendor is not legally obligated to honor it. This isn’t a case of strict liability. Frankly, the “prima facie” provision sheds more heat than light. The VA statute would operate precisely the same way if that provision wasn’t there. Absence of intent (showing that the price was advertised in error) is an affirmative defense. That would be true with or without the “prima facie” provision.
Call it an appeal to authority but...I’ve spent the past 36 years dealing with statutory interpretation, and a good deal of the past 25 involved in drafting or passing them. The “prima facie” provision is a superfluity, and it should have been left out of the statute.
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Indeed. Sloppy drafting. Happens all the time. The point remains, the statute would operate precisely the same way, with or without that provision. That's why I would have left it out. (I'm always happy to discuss the finer points of legislative drafting. It tends to bore my friends
).
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All they would need to do to refute it is point out the matching SKU number, and show they had offered a return and corrected the ad. Literally anything to show that it was unintentional and not ongoing would refute the prima facie evidence. That kind of destroys your statement that they would have to be held to the price if they were a brick and mortar store in VA.
Perhaps, but SMKW shipped the lesser item, and only offered a return after being challenged. Makes one wonder if SMKW contacted others they screwed on the deal to offer a refund or are just letting those deals ride if not contacted.
Regardless, SMKW got self-inflicted bad press among knife enthusiasts and turned away prior and potential customers.
