Our household received a voucher from a company called Naked Wines.

It said: “special treat for customers of Amazon.co.uk – £40 naked wines voucher”. It also said “claim your voucher online or by telephone”; “choose your wines from our delicious range”; “next day delivery to your doorstep”, and the thing which I think is key “claim your £40 gift today”.

Note that use of the word gift. Note also that while the voucher says you can use your voucher to buy 12 bottles of wine for only £39.99, it does not say that you must; indeed you are specifically advised to “choose your wines from our delicious range”:

Note also that when you do go online, you then see this, again emphasising the freeness of the wine in question:

So that when you do go online, and you look to pick up your gift of free wine, it turns out that you have to pay a minimum of £79.99 to qualify for this, which means that you’ve got to pay forty quid in order to get eighty quid’s worth of wine. Now I don’t call this free (at best, it’s half price), and I don’t call it a gift.

Nowhere on the voucher does it mention this.

In my opinion (which obviously does not carry any legal status), I have been misled by this advertising. I have been led to believe I can receive a gift of free wine, and when I go to claim it, I find out that they are not prepared to offer me a free gift at all, unless I’m willing to part with forty quid.

I for one will not be using their service. Partly because it’s not necessarily a brilliant deal, partly because their “comments from customers” do not include any negative responses (and I know I put one in) so they appear to be trying to whitewash this, partly because I don’t know whether the wines are actually worth the prices they quote (there doesn’t appear to be any way of comparing their prices to anyone else’s), partly because there are some major accessibility problems with their site — missing alt text on rather key things such as image links, parts of the site not working without javascript, and so on — and obviously partly because I’m a little unhappy about their voucher.

So since Naked Wines wanted to offer me something for free, it would be churlish of me not to return the favour. So I will offer them something for free (and by free I do mean free) — my qualified endorsement. If you want to support a company which makes it more difficult for disabled people to use their site, who tell you that they are offering you a gift of free wine which turns out to basically only be a money-off offer where you’ve got to pay a minimum of forty quid, and who don’t give you an opportunity to compare their wine prices with anyone else, then I’d urge you to buy stuff from Naked Wines.

I’ll even offer them a site audit at 10% off, if they want to address the accessibility problems and other concerns… (mind you, the costs for this do start somewhat above the forty quid mark) …seems fair?