WATCH OUT! Amazon hauled back to court in Special Ops wristjob ding-dong Appeals judges ruled on Monday that the Sultans of Seattle will have to go court over "the manner in which the website responded to a shopper's search request" for Multi Time Machine's (MTM) Special Ops watches. Revising the LA district court's summary judgment which dismissed MTM's suit, the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals …
"reasonably prudent shopper" that's a hell of an assumption. Especially in land of the free. Has this judge never read the tales of retail woe at notalwaysright? Customers can be idiots and not making it clear that something isn't stocked is grounds I would say for a complaint. Especially if what's been offered is skirting very close to trademark/registered design infringement.
The strange thing is the job I look at with most fond memories was a retail job... but then It was perfectly fine to drink while serving. Even to the point where we once did half a shift 2 drinks from horizontal (the tills came up perfectly though which is all the more confusing).
I miss my wine merchant days... still at least I can afford to buy the drink now instead of hoping to beg some off a rep.
...to deceive, then there should be no case. It's quite common to show similar products in a web search when the specific product is not available. It would be pretty unrealistic to expect a search engine to NOT provide similar products if they don't offer the exact product. It would seem like the solution is to sell or advertise your product through Amazon or some other search engine.
...but Amazon isn't a search engine in the general sense that Bing or Google is: it's just an in-store product finder that I'll consult to see if Amazon or one of their concession-holders stock the thing I'm looking for.
I'm with the judges on this: if I go to a shopping site and ask for a specific branded item I expect to be told whether they have it or not and the price if they have one. If I've asked for a Samsung Note 5 I do not want to be offered an MS Surface 3 or an iPad: I know what I want and all I need to know is 'We sell it, the price is £££££ and we've got 99 in stock' or 'Sorry, we don't sell that'.
Of course the situation is different if I've asked a generic question such as "Do you have 10 inch tablets"? In that case and only in that case I'm expecting to see a list of all the items that match the request.
My initial reaction was to agree with you but I was curious, so I did some Amazon searches to see.
If you search "MTM Spec Ops Watches" there is no indication it doesn't understand what the "MTM" part means - it even auto-completes. If you search "WTF Spec Ops Watches" or "XXX Spec Ops Watches" then it strips the initial acronym from your search (strike out style font) and shows you results for "Spec Ops Watches" - this suggests that they DO know what you're searching for, and the results page proceeds to behave inconsistently with when it legitimately doesn't know.
I don't know enough to know if this is wrong, but I certainly don't think Amazon should be required to maintain a list of "products sold online that we don't carry" complete with links to other e-retailers selling said products.
If I walk into a physical shop and say, for example 'I'm in the market for a Rolex watch', if the jeweller says 'I'm afraid I don't sell Rolex but I do sell these Omega watches and they are very popular'. Can Rolex sue the shop? Of course not, any retailer will try to sell what they have rather than show people the door, be it physical or virtual.
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