Pricewatch »

• Shop doesn’t take its own vouchers

  January 12, 2009 @ 8:58 pm | by Conor Pope

  A salutary lesson in connection with gift vouchers from a reader in Dublin. She bought a €50 gift voucher from Topshop in Blanchardstown just before Christmas as a birthday present for her 19-year-old sister and assumed that the they could be used in Topshop’s retail outlet in Cork city where her sister lives.

  It wasn’t to be. When the sister went to use the voucher in Cork she was told that it didn’t accept vouchers as the shop was a concession store within Debenhams and only Debenhams gift cards were acceptable.

  “I gave my sister €50 and on my return to Dublin I went to Blanchardstown to return the voucher. The sales assistant went to speak to a manager and returned after about five minutes to say that they couldn’t offer me a refund on the voucher and as I didn’t have a receipt there was nothing they could do.

  “I e-mailed the customer service department for Arcadia Group, the owners of Topshop on 30th December and received an automated reply to say I would receive a response to my query within 24 hours, but I haven’t heard anything since.”

  We had a look at the terms and conditions on the vouchers in question and they do state that the card cannot be used in Topshop concessions in third-party department stores, although, to be fair to our reader, she could hardly have known that before she bought the vouchers. We also contacted the company to see if there was anything it could do for her but we’re still waiting to hear back from them.

• Voucher confusion

  December 12, 2007 @ 12:08 pm | by Conor Pope

  On Pricewatch on Monday there was a piece from someone complaining about the time limits on gift vouchers – over a third of all vouchers sold in this country have some time restrictions on them and around ten per cent end up never being used. This reader had a One4all gift voucher which had passed its use-by date and she was wondering if there was anything she could do to have it extended. According to An Post, which backs the gift voucher system, all vouchers expire 12 months after the date of issue and the website says quite clearly that “unfortunately we are unable to extend this date”.

  That turns out to be completely wrong. After the piece appeared, two readers got in touch saying that they had managed to have their One4All vouchers extended with a simple phone call and an admin fee of either €2 or €8. So I got in touch with the company to find out what was going on. A spokeswoman told me that “officially” there is an expiry date on the gift vouchers “so we have control over the life of the gift voucher to protect against lost and stolen gift vouchers” (I’m not quite sure how that is supposed to work). But if apparently if “someone genuinely has a voucher that is out of date we do over ride our own rules [and] extend the expiry dates for a fee of €8″ which is good to know.

  It’d be nice it One4All or An Post let people about this override facility on their websites instead of telling them the complete opposite.

• Vouchers a gift for retailers

  December 10, 2007 @ 1:07 pm | by Conor Pope

  A reader from Cork contacted us to ask about the legality of imposing time limits on cashing in gift vouchers. She noticed just a little too late that a One4all gift voucher she’d been given last year had passed its use-by date.

  “Is there anything I can do to have it extended, and is it legal to impose such a limit?” she asks.

  Unfortunately, the answers are no and yes, in that order.

  According to An Post, which backs the gift voucher system, all vouchers expire 12 months after the date of issue and “unfortunately we are unable to extend this date”. The problem is not unique to One4all vouchers, and more than one-third of all vouchers sold in this country have time restrictions.

  The voucher market is worth around €330 million a year in Ireland. The gifts are so popular that, in the Christmas run-up, the National Consumer Agency felt compelled to remind people to ask retailers about voucher expiry dates before purchase. Incidentally, more than 10 per cent of vouchers are never redeemed, which a windfall of around €40 million each year for retailers.