Ad description
A website for online retailer Amazon, www.amazon.co.uk, contained information about a premium account facility called 'Amazon Prime'. Under the heading "Amazon Prime - All You Can Eat One-Day Delivery" the website outlined some of the benefits of subscribing to Amazon Prime including, "Unlimited FREE One-Day Delivery on millions of eligible items sold by Amazon.co.uk", "Express Delivery for £4.49 per item" and "No minimum purchase required". Further information under the terms and conditions stated, "Membership Benefits. Amazon Prime members are entitled to free guaranteed One-Day delivery on all items marked as Amazon Prime eligible delivered to Mainland United Kingdom Locations".
Issue
Three complainants challenged whether the claim, "Amazon Prime members are entitled to free guaranteed One-Day delivery on all items marked as Amazon Prime eligible delivered to Mainland United Kingdom Locations" was misleading because they had signed up to the service but found that a significant number of orders were not delivered within one day.
Response
Amazon EU Sarl (Amazon) stated that the Prime One-Day delivery was a guaranteed service. They also stated that on the One-Day Delivery web page it said that "Amazon.co.uk guarantees One-Day delivery of items by the estimated* delivery date" and that customers would receive their order "1 business day after dispatch". Amazon said when a Prime member placed an order they were provided with a guaranteed delivery date. They said this would not necessarily be one day after the order was placed, but would be one business day after the order was due to be dispatched by Amazon as set out in One-Day Delivery terms and conditions and the help pages. They said, depending on what time of day the order was placed, the item might be dispatched on the same day or on the following day. For example: if an order was placed on a Monday morning and Amazon could dispatch the same day, the order would be guaranteed to arrive the next day i.e. Tuesday. However, if an order was placed late on a Friday evening, Amazon would usually dispatch on the Saturday and delivery would be guaranteed for the next business day, i.e. Monday. They said there were restrictions to this service, such as geographical restrictions, which were set out in the fine print.
Amazon also stated that Prime customers whose deliveries were not received by the guaranteed delivery date should contact their customer services team, as requested on the One-Day Delivery web page. They said they operated a policy to compensate customers in the event of a delivery not arriving by the guaranteed delivery date. Amazon said this policy, although not published on their website, was applied on a case by case basis.
Amazon said they used the services of multiple couriers, including Royal Mail, to carry out the delivery of One-Day Delivery items. They said that not every courier had a means of tracking delivery performance but, based on their own data for traceable services and the courier's own statistics for non-traceable services, the vast majority of orders were delivered by the guaranteed delivery date. Amazon added that there were instances when they failed to meet the guaranteed delivery date due to factors outside of their control but they maintained that they met the guaranteed performance criteria in the vast majority of cases and also operated a policy to compensate consumers when these were not met.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted that the One-Day Deliver web page stated, "If I request One-Day delivery, when will I receive my order? One business day after dispatch". However, we noted that the complainants had objected to claims, on the Prime web pages, that Prime members would enjoy a guaranteed One-Day Delivery service. We noted that neither these pages, nor the Prime terms and conditions page, explained that "One-Day" meant one day after dispatch. Although we noted that the One-Day Delivery web page was accessible through a further link on the Prime terms and conditions page, we considered that Amazon had not made it sufficiently clear or prominent that "One-Day Delivery" referred to one day after dispatch. We considered that without clear and prominent qualification consumers would understand from the claim, "One-Day Delivery" that delivery would be on the day after the order was placed.
We noted that Amazon used a variety of couriers for One-Day Delivery and that one complainant objected to Amazon using Royal Mail's First Class service for a One-Day delivery order. We noted that Royal Mail's First Class delivery service was not a guaranteed service and, according to the Royal Mail website, delivery would take between one and two days. We noted Amazon's assertion that the vast majority of One-Day deliveries arrived by the guaranteed delivery date.
We also noted that the service was described as "guaranteed" and that the complainants objected to this because numerous orders had not been delivered to them on time. We considered that describing the delivery option as guaranteed implied that Amazon would take steps to ensure that orders would be delivered within one day, unless circumstances beyond their control prevented this. Furthermore, we considered that "guaranteed" implied that, when delivery was not achieved in the stated timeframe, Amazon would compensate customers in some form or another.
We noted that Amazon stated that they had a policy in place to compensate customers in the event that they failed to deliver orders by the guaranteed delivery date. However, we also noted that this was not explained on their website. We considered that in order for such a policy to help support the claim that the service was "guaranteed", customers should have access to the full terms and conditions of the policy.
Because we understood that Amazon used non-guaranteed services such as Royal Mail First Class for these orders, we considered that describing the service as "guaranteed" was misleading. Because we considered the "One-Day delivery" claim was ambiguous and the claim that the service was "guaranteed" was not adequately qualified or substantiated we concluded that the website was misleading.
The website breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules
3.1
3.1
Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.
and
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.
(Misleading advertising) and
3.7
3.7
Before distributing or submitting a marketing communication for publication, marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove claims that consumers are likely to regard as objective and that are capable of objective substantiation. The ASA may regard claims as misleading in the absence of adequate substantiation.
(Substantiation).
Action
We told Amazon to include clear qualification on pages which stated 'One-Day Delivery' that this referred to one day after dispatch. We also told them to remove the claim that the service was guaranteed, until this could be substantiated.
