A complaint was raised in relation to claims made on the website for online shopping club MYSALE. The website featured a banner which stated: “Free Shopping with ourpay select”, and linked to another webpage which claimed: “Ourpay Select – Buy Now Pay Later combined with Free Delivery”. Further text said: “A 12-month delivery subscription combining buy now pay later and free delivery. Select from one of the three plans at checkout”. Next to this was a box in which it was written: “4 free deliveries…You Save 10.00”.
The complaint challenged whether the “free shipping” and “free delivery” claims made were misleading, since consumers had to pay £10 for four “free” deliveries.
The ASA held that consumers would have understood from the website that no monetary commitment (beyond purchasing the goods) was necessary to qualify for free delivery. It was therefore misleading for MYSALE to refer to delivery as “free”. “Select” was a delivery subscription service, through which deliveries could be redeemed against orders placed using the payment method “Ourpay”. Pictures alongside the claims “buy now pay later” and “free delivery”, showed tiers of four, eight and twelve “free” deliveries, and purported savings against each. However, the claims represented savings against standard delivery fees for the corresponding number of “free” deliveries in each plan. Whilst the subscription was cheaper than the usual delivery costs charged, the deliveries were not “free”. Therefore, the advertisement breached the CAP Code on the basis that it was misleading and did not make clear the extent of the commitment which the consumer had to make in order to take advantage of the purported “free” offer.
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