Payment Question - Is this legal?

[AnnaWilde]

Hi

Can anyone tell me - is it legal to charge a customer LESS than the amount printed on their e-commerce receipt?

Here's the scenario - we have a client using Actinic Catalog 5. We are building a loyalty points scheme to enable returning customers to earn points which eventually gets them a voucher which they can then trade against products they buy.

The whole thing is being done on a tight budget and, because of this, in a slightly 'home made' way. We had thought to allow the customer to enter their voucher number at the point of sale and then, when the order is downloaded the amount of the voucher could be removed from the total cost and the transaction swiped in the usual way.

Trouble is their receipt email - which is automatically generated - will reflect the price before voucher discount. Is this legal? Would we be breaking the law by doing this?

Sure, we could take the supplied scripts to pieces and do our own programming to allow for a much more polished solution - but not for the amount of money they have available.

All feedback gratefully received!

Cheers

Anna

[Charlesn]

I'm not sure that its illegal, but if I was expecting a discount I would prefer to know when entering my card details how much I was going to be charged.

You could always create new accounts for your customers in the loyalty scheme. Then when they qualify for a voucher you can add a discount to their account which would show on their total and receipt, then remove it again once they have purchased.

We are offering a similar scheme where if you purchase a certain item between now and the end of Feb, you can claim 20% off your next order. All we are doing is creating an account for those customers who qualify for the discount, giving them the login details, then removing the discount once they have ordered again.

[Mike Hughes]

There are two things to think of:

1) The customer receipt isn't generated until after the sale has been processed. If you're thinking of the 'order confirmation' email that is sent automatically, then you could change the wording slightly to say something like "The price displayed excludes customer discounts that will be applied to your account before your credit card is charged"

2) You cannot charge less than an invoice states as the VAT man will get very angry when you try and explain why you don't really owe him as much as he thinks. And yes, it is illegal.

As the earlier comments says, this doesn't sound like a great solution.

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

PS. Why not just create a 'voucher discount' product that has the appropriate price. e.g. -£10, etc.

All the shopper would need to do is add it to their basket and then include the voucher information at checkout. If they didn't have a valid number then you just wouldn't ship the 'voucher' and the discount would never be applied.

Does anyone know if actinic can handle negative product prices ? OK I answered this myself, tried it and got an error message, so it's not allowed.

Mike