Have you ever made the mistake of incorrect pricing of goods in your business?

Did you explain to the customer the error and ask them to pay more? or did you

Incorrect Pricing of Goods - what do you do

accept the loss and carry on. I would imagine that it would depend on the difference between the correct and incorrect price.

In the store next to mine, a staff member put a necklace on sale with a retail price of $165.00 down to $10.00. The customer was unaware of this obvious (to us) error, and the owner, who happened to be serving at the time continued with the sale as if nothing was wrong. Of course what she could have done was pointed out the error and asked the customer to pay more. However what would that have achieved? Possibly an irate customer and a stressed out owner.

Just last week I had a similar situation in my store and it was all my fault. I had put some boots on sale on my online store for $89.00 instead on $189.00. You can imagine my frustration when the order came trough & I had to process at the $89.00. So I just sucked it up and called it good customer service. Vowing not to make the same mistake again.

The legal situation will vary from country to country ( or state to state) so it’snot something I can go into in depth here.

Incorrect pricing of goods in advertising

If this was a case of an error in advertising to the public at large, sometimes a disclaimer in the advert may go some way to provide a remedy to the business, so that they may be able to charge the correct price. In many countries there are laws on false advertising so double or triple checking all advertising copy is the best policy. My hope is that in this case of incorrect pricing of goods, common sense will prevail. Well it may be a faint hope.

Is it a case of providing good customer service?

In my first example, this can be seen as simply good customer service. The owner was able to control her feelings, and, well lets face it, slight rage, and continue the sale. If the other tack was taken, the worst case result could have been a customer walking out of the store unhappy, maybe telling others of how she was ‘mislead’.

It’s a hard decision and again my view is that it would depend on the size of the error. If the customer knew or suspected of the incorrect pricing of the goods, as you can often tell, and was trying to take advantage that is a different story.

What do you think? Have you had any experience with this from a legal perspective in your part of the world. And have you had conflicting legal opinions. How would you cope with the incorrect pricing of goods? would you put it down to providing good customer service? It may pay to ask your local small business association on their views on the legal aspects what can be done when the goods have been priced incorrectly.