No you’re being unreasonable. They’re not responsible for the fact that you had this shipped outside the US – without first checking it – and had to pay duties. Sorry. They should pay to have it picked up in the US, but that’s it.
Be a nice UCC law school exam question.
Company B advertises a Widget. Company B no longer has Widget but failed to update catalog. Company A orders a Widget. Company B accepts PO, invoices, receives payment, ships a Zidget. Company A accepts shipment of Zidget without inspection, and ships to Company A overseas plant, incurring considerable shipping costs. Company A overseas plant inspects shipment, notes Zidget.
What is Company A’s recourse against Company B?
Fascinating.
Yeah, assuming all of the information in the thread above is correct, it appears that the OP left out quite a few salient aspects of the whole sequence of events. Let’s see if I understand it all correctly:
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OP went online to search for a specific wine that is currently the subject of a lot of buzz in the wine community (as well as some eye raising price inflation on auctions recently). Also a wine that is well known to be currently quite difficult to source.
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If OPs experience in that online search was anything like it’s been for most of the rest of us, the search results were pretty barren. Which is probably because any importer, distributor and/or retailer who has access to allocations of this wine is going to make sure these get in the hands of their best customers. They ain’t gonna be putting them in their generic online inventory.
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And then, magically, they find a source who appears to have this wine available – and, at a price that sure seems reasonable (which was probably the normal retail price of the '05 Tondonia red, which is pretty widely available). Most of us would be quite excited to find this situation – but then our “due diligence alarms” would start going off. Hmm… Why is this site offering it, when pretty much nobody else is? Uh, oh, they don’t ship to my country. So I’m taking the risk once they deliver in the U.S. It looks good, but, man, this seems like a risky transaction. If I’m going to pull the trigger, I’d better check and double-check, because this will be hard to unwind of there is a problem. Instead (it appears), the OP ignored those warning signs in their enthusiasm for “the deal”.
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Supplier shipping and secondary shipping go fine, and the wines arrive. OP opens them up and finds they are not the wines that were ordered. Rightfully so, OP is pissed. OP calls the retailer to try to get the situation resolved (but probably already knows he’s screwed).
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Retailer looks into it, and realizes their inventory error. They don’t have the 08 rose, and they never did. Retailer acknowledges the wine that was shipped was not the one ordered, and offers to pay for the return of the wine – from where they originally shipped it to. OP asks them to still ship the 08 rose, which they can’t do, because they never had it - and probably couldn’t get it if they wanted to. OP then asks retailer to pay the costs related to downstream shipping beyond where the retailer shipped it. Retailer declines, since that wasn’t part of the original shipping scope.
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Given that the retailer screwed up on the order, but doesn’t have the wines the OP wanted and the OP (understandably) doesn’t want to pay the incremental costs to get the wine back to the U.S. (from where the retailer would accept the return), retailer offers a small credit as a good-will gesture.
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OP comes onto online wine forum, and selectively posts aspects of the transaction that only make them look good and retailer look bad. Maybe that gets them leverage with the retailer; if not, they get a little payback.
Whadda ya think, did I summarize correctly?
Perhaps I am too influenced by the ethic of customer service in the Pacific NW, as well as a somewhat antiquated notion of customer service generally. It seems to me that if the advertised wine was as stated by the OP (i.e. the 2008 Rosado); that he paid money based upon that assumption (not matter how unreasonable it might have been for him to assume that they had such wine); and the company then shipped a wine to him based upon that transaction; THEN it seems to me, as a matter of customer service, they should make him whole. Yes, as a legal matter there might be a fight; and yes, perhaps he was getting a deal that many cooler heads might have thought near impossible. But the reality is the business advertised X, and in the end they did not have X. For the company it is a small expense. The reputational hit is perhaps much greater.
Wine.com offered to make him whole, but only if they could get back the wine they shipped, which is only fair. It’s not their fault that the OP later shipped the wrong wine out of the country. They offered to pick it up from where they shipped it.
Fair enough. Which may mean that there might be an issue with the secondary shipper. But yes, I can see the issue from wine.bid’s point of view. I guess it depends on whether they knew he was out of the country; knew that it would be shipped overseas, etc. But at the end of the day it seems to be short term thinking with perhaps long term consequences. But of course they have every right to do that. That is what competition is for. If some of us don’t find it fair or professional, then we don’t have to use them. Others who feel differently, can use them.
There’s no issue with the secondary shipper. He ordered wine for delivery in the US, and they were happy to make good on that. They have no legal or moral obligation to compensate him for the the cost of exporting/importing it, or for his failure to check the shipment before it left the US. No retailer wants this kind of business, with unknown, unforseeable consequences and costs. It seems to me they’ve showed good faith and he’s being completely unreasonable.
So to be fair, I don’t feel like I know all of the relevant facts here with respect to the secondary shipper – at least as I understand the relevant facts for your position.
I will say that I have bought wine from overseas before. I have emailed the wine store or winery. They take my money for a certain wine. Through them my wine has been shipped to me in the US via a third party. Now if the wine showed up at the airport here (where I usually accept it) and it was the wrong wine, I guess technically there might be an issue with the third party shipper. But I would expect, if the wine was the wrong one, then the winery or wine store would make good on the mistake. But again, I think people’s expectations differ. And I think it is reasonable to take the position that you and others have. I just think my position is more reasonable. 
Oh, please. Ron, call Esquin, McCarthy & Schiering, Pike & Western, Champion, University Wines, or any other wine shop in the greater Seattle or Puget Sound region. Find one who, given the set of facts here, would reimburse a purchaser (who clearly was never going to purchase from them again) for transportation costs beyond the scope of where they agreed to ship. So, if this guy picked up his wines and had them then helicoptered to a boat, the shop should reimburse for those shipping costs, too…
Sheeze…
I will say that I don’t think it’s unreasonable to at least place the purchase for the Rose. Wine.com undoubtedly has massive buying power, has facilities/warehouses in nearly every state, and may well have access to some small allocation that entered and very quickly exited their system without an inventory notification or POS update. Especially at a relatively low price point. So on that front, I don’t think a customer has any obligation to be triple checking or performing additional diligence. A massive national retailer is broadcasting that they have the wine you’re attempting to purchase. Okay, I think it’s fair to pull the trigger on that.
Hi Micheal,
You make it sound as if I had some type of malicious intent in calling out the retailer, as well as “selectively” leaving out information. This is not true.
I was on wine.com looking for another wine, I entered the “Hard-to-Find” tab where they have all the expensive stuff listed, including the other Tondonia Gran Reservas. The Reservas weren’t listed under that tab, which to my mind signaled that yes they did have a differentiated notion of both products… one’s rarer than the other.
Going on price, I was not aware of the huge surge in pricing within the US market. I had purchased one Rosado a month or so ago from a retailer I do regular business with at $80. I also checked the worldwide pricing on said bottle and it was about 20 to 30 dollars, more or less wine.com price. I’ve been offered the bottling at wholesale pricing, when adding in duties and all that more or less is around the global pricing average, but can’t import it that way due to bureaucratic paperwork (sanitary registry) that doesn’t exist with the US due to a Free Trade agreement.
Moreover, they have a little chat box on the site, not sure if its a bot or what not, but they did confirm that this was in case the rosado. I pull the trigger and wait for it to arrive. Now the US address I have is a simple forwarder, they don’t provide the service of opening up the case and checking if the wine is what I ordered. The cases are only opened here once they arrive at customs, for security purposes.
When I called the retailer to resolve the issue they first tell me they can have it picked up. I explained the situation and ask them to send me the correct bottles, but they were out of stock. I asked if they could source more, and they say no. If they would’ve told me they’d send me the correct ones, fine no problems and I’d pay full price on the next shipment… I understand these sort of things happen.
I later explained that I had to pay duties on said wines, and if they could work out something with me. I’ve had this happen before with other retailers, some have comped me shipping or a portion of the duties I’ve paid, others have even given me a similar bottle of my liking at cost as a way of saying sorry, and on one occasion it was a first time buy.
My gripe apart from being led to believe they had the wine and receiving the incorrect bottles is that they basically told me that they could only offer me 20 dollars and that’s it because it was company policy, nothing else can be done and have a great day. I’m an importer and retailer here in Panama, I would never treat my customers that way, and would have found a way to work it out to a suitable compromise for both parties.
Everything that happened after the wine was delivered to the U.S. delivery address is not relevant. Wine.com’s legal obligations/duties ended there (if not before).
It would be presumptuous for me to comment on intent, as that’s difficult to accurately assess on an Internet forum.
However, lets be honest… Your original post did leave out reference to any relevant facts that would make the supplier look less bad. You didn’t mention that they offered to pick-up the wine from where they delivered it too and credit your purchase, or that the costs you were asking them to reimburse for were related to actions you took after they finished delivery at the agreed upon location. At least from my perspective, those facts make this much less of a clear cut case of malicious intent on the retailer’s part (unless you are going to maintain that your use of “bait and switch” in the thread title wasn’t intended to imply malicious intent on the retailer’s part).
By the way, I do empathize with you. I’d be pissed off, too, if this happened to me. And, from a customer service perspective, it sure would have been nice if they had gone above-and-beyond what is normally expected in this situation and tried to accommodate you. But I suspect there are very few wine retailers who would do so under those conditions.
All that being said, especially with you being ITB, if you are really being honest with yourself you knew you were taking some risk with this transaction from the start. And, even more than the average wine purchaser, you know the importance of verifying what you’ve received at the point the supplier has delivered - before you incur additional costs for activities within your control.
Not trying to absolve the retailer from responsibility for the problem - it was clearly their fault. However, they did offer to make you whole for all aspects of your bargain for them, by picking up the wine from where they gave it to you, and refunding your payment. And (in my opinion) that’s not an unreasonable position for a supplier to take (even though you have expectations of more generous customer service actions). That being said, if I were you I probably also would not buy from them again.
I agree. Asking for reimbursement of shipping/duties to get it to another country is completely unreasonable. It’s irrelevant what anyone else has done. That expectation is unreasonable.
Also, “bait & switch” implies that it was intentional, which it clearly was not.
Wine.com has sent me the wrong wine before, I ordered a Marchesi di Barolo Barbaresco and they sent a Machesi di Barolo Barolo, easy mistake to make if you don’t know wine. They comped the wine they sent as they didn’t have the barbaresco to send. I’ve aslo had 3 bottles show up with heat damage, I sent them a photo of the corks protruding and they resent the order no charge.
I don’t like wine.com prices, I only buy when I get a really good coupon but service has always been top notch.
Jim
Wait.
I would love if this happened to me!!! 