John Lewis broke advertising rules by pulling Apple Watch deal

John Lewis has been reprimanded by the advertising watchdog for running a Black Friday promotion offering the Apple Watch on sale, only to pull it from its website until the next day when it was marked up to full price.

The ruling is a blow to the reputation of John Lewis, which prides itself on its clean corporate image. The retailer argued that the breach of the UK advertising code was a misunderstanding.

In November, a promotion ran on johnlewis.com advertising the Apple Watch at £249 as part of its promise to match competitors’ prices.

The company, which has used the strapline “never knowingly undersold” since 1925, ran the Apple Watch promotion at the same time as pushing a four-day Black Friday sales event promising that “we’ve lowered hundreds of prices this weekend”.

The Advertising Standards Authority received a complaint from a shopper, who found that the Apple Watch was listed as out of stock when she tried to buy it but that it was made available the following day at full price.

John Lewis said the Apple Watch deal had proved so popular that a decision was made to pull it from the price match sale over concerns they would not have enough stock to fulfil all orders.

The company said it had boosted the Apple Watch back to full price the next day because the competitor had stopped running its promotion, and listed it as out of stock online until after the separate four-day Black Friday sale ended.

John Lewis admitted that it might have stopped selling the discounted Apple Watch online sooner than it could have done.

The company said that removing stock from sale was “not a decision we would take lightly” and that it had been done in good faith because Black Friday is the biggest retailing day of the year.

The department store group reported its best ever weekly revenues of almost £200m last year thanks to Black Friday.

The ASA said the advertising code states that promotions must be run “equitably, promptly and efficiently and be seen to deal fairly and honourably with participants”.

It added: “We considered John Lewis’s action to make a product unavailable on their website while their competitor’s promotion was still running denied online consumers the opportunity to purchase at the price-match price, despite John Lewis still having stock available. We told John Lewis Partnership to ensure they dealt fairly with consumers in future.

“We told them to avoid causing unnecessary disappointment and not to withhold availability of promotional stock.”

A spokeswoman for the retailer said the issue had arisen because of a mix-up in interpretation of two different deals and the very limited stock of Apple Watches.

“We’re disappointed by the ASA’s decision,” said the spokeswoman. “We believe this is due to a misunderstanding of the difference between a one-day unplanned price match applied because of our never knowingly undersold policy and planned John Lewis four-day Black Friday promotions.”

The company said the breach of the UK ad code had prompted it to review how it advertises multiple promotions and deals “to avoid any possible confusion happening again”.

“We had very limited stock and continued to sell the watches in our shops, matching the competitor’s promotion for the one day that it ran,” the spokeswoman said. “Removing stock from sale is not a decision we would take lightly.”