Ad description

A website that promoted laptop batteries and adaptors, www.pcbattery.co.uk, listed products in pounds and included text on a page headed "Payment and Shipping" that stated "All products will be shipped by AirMail. If you would like to change to other shipping way [sic], please contact our customer support. Usually, your order will be processed within 24 hours after you placed order, [sic] The parcel will be sent out within 48 hours(Sundays and holidays excepted). You will be advised by email when the goods is dispatched [sic]".

Issue

The complainant challenged whether the website was misleading because it did not make clear that the items would be shipped from China.

Response

XT-Tec Ltd t/a pcbattery.co.uk did not respond to the ASA's enquiries.

Assessment

Upheld

The ASA was concerned by XT-Tec's lack of response and apparent disregard for the Code, which was a breach of CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 1.7 (Unreasonable delay). We reminded them of their responsibility to respond promptly to our enquiries and we told them to do so in future.

We noted that the Code required marketers, including distance sellers, to make clear their geographical address and to include material information such as the arrangements for delivery. Whilst we considered that the text on the "Payment and Shipping" section of the website that stated "All products will be shipped by AirMail. If you would like to change to other shipping way [sic], please contact our customer support" implied that the products would be shipped from outside the UK, we did not consider that it made clear that the products would be shipped from China. We considered the website as a whole and considered that, in addition to the lack of any information that the company was based in China, a number of features implied that XT-Tec was a UK-based company, including the listing of prices in pounds sterling and the website URL www.pcbattery.co.uk. Because we considered that consumers were likely to understand that products purchased from a UK-based company would be shipped from the UK, and because we did not consider the reference to products being shipped by Airmail to be prominent enough to negate the overall impression that XT-Tec was a UK-based company, we concluded that the ad breached the Code.

The ad breached the CAP Code (Edition 12) rules  3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.    3.3 3.3 Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
Material information is information that the consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product. Whether the omission or presentation of material information is likely to mislead the consumer depends on the context, the medium and, if the medium of the marketing communication is constrained by time or space, the measures that the marketer takes to make that information available to the consumer by other means.
   3.4.2 3.4.2 the identity (for example, a trading name) and geographical address of the marketer and any other trader on whose behalf the marketer is acting  and  3.4.5 3.4.5 the arrangements for payment, delivery, performance or complaint handling, if those differ from the arrangements that consumers are likely to reasonably expect  (Misleading advertising) and 9.1 and 9.2.4 (Distance Selling).

Action

The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told XT-Tec Ltd t/a pcbattery.co.uk to ensure their advertising made clear their geographical address and arrangements for delivery. We referred the matter to CAP's Compliance team.

CAP Code (Edition 12)

3.1     3.3     3.4.2     3.4.5     9.1     9.2.4    


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