When is a promotion nothing of the sort?

"They did not reduce the onsite prices by 2.13%. At least they did not on the 3 bosch appliances I have been considering"

"I agree - None of the speake[r]s / amps I was looking at are reduced either"

"I was tempted to pick up one of those Western Digital Media Players, it was £79 on their website last night, but it's now £99."

"gotta agree also, couple of TV prices i was looking at have not been reduced, arguably a little higher now. Not good."

All of the above are genuine quotes from The DVD Forums following our promotion of today's Double VAT Cut promotion at Pixmania. The general gist of the offer is Pixmania would reduce their prices in line with the UK VAT rate cut and then knock off another 2.5% - so a small, but nice saving.

What they actually appear to have done with a number of products is put their prices up instead. By quite a lot in some cases!

Doesn't sound like a particularly good promotion to me...

It's not the first time this has happened - I've seen many instances of promotions being put together by online merchants only to discover that their 'standard' prices for certain items have miraculously increased overnight making their sale price the same as the full price the day before! That's not a sale and it makes those of us pushing these offers to our users look stupid for wasting their time.

Not one of the people quoted above will be likely to bother with Pixmania again now and I can't really blame them. What does this kind of misleading behaviour achieve?