Wrong Price on Your Website: Do You Have to Sell?

A farm machinery dealer in Cavan put his parts catalogue online and ran his first real sale on it. Somebody updated the price on a hydraulic pump and the decimal point landed one place to the left. Orders arrived through the night. Same part, several buyers, one of them ordering in quantity, every order sitting below what the stock had cost him to buy in.

That scene is a composite rather than one company, but I have taken some version of the call more than once and the opening line never changes. The price was on my website. People ordered. Am I stuck with it?

Almost never. The reason has less to do with the number you displayed than with two things most owners have never actually read: their own terms and conditions, and the email their website sends the moment an order lands.

The law here is kinder than the folklore

Start with the part that surprises people, because it is the opposite of what most of us absorbed somewhere along the way.

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission is direct about it. Where a price indication is wrong and the marked price is lower than the price charged at the till, "there is no obligation on the shop to offer the item at the lower price" ^[1]. Citizens Information puts the same rule in consumer language: where a trader makes a mistake and the actual price is higher than the price displayed, the customer must be told the correct price before paying, and the trader "does not automatically have to sell to you at the lower price" ^[2].

Good news, and then two obligations hiding inside it.

You must tell the customer before they pay. The CCPC's advertising guidance states it plainly from the business side: if you provide an incorrect price, you must inform the customer before the transaction takes place ^[3]. And you must fix it. Citizens Information adds that traders must correct the mistake as soon as possible ^[2].

So the law gives you a way out of the wrong price. It does not give you permission to leave the wrong price up while you think about it. In practice the clock starts the second you notice, because every hour that figure stays live is another handful of buyers you will be ringing individually to explain yourself to.

The clause that decides the outcome is usually in your own paperwork, not in the legislation.

The sentence that decides it is in your own terms

This is where owner-operators get caught, and it has nothing to do with consumer legislation.

Citizens Information, in its guidance on pricing, tells consumers something businesses rarely think about from their own side: when buying online, "the contract terms often reserve the right to cancel the transaction where there has been a genuine or obvious pricing error" ^[2]. That is the mechanism. Not a special rule for websites, just an ordinary clause in ordinary terms and conditions, doing the work when a number goes wrong at three in the morning.

If your site has that clause, you have a clean, documented basis for cancelling the mispriced orders and refunding in full. Where there are no terms at all, or a set copied from somewhere in 2019 that nobody has looked at since, you are improvising during the one week you cannot afford to improvise.

There is a delivery requirement too. The CCPC expects that a consumer "should be able to review the full T&Cs prior to concluding an online or distance contract" ^[4]. A link in the footer that no customer passes on the way to payment is weaker than a tick box at checkout. This is one of the few pieces of website legal groundwork that genuinely earns its keep, and it takes an afternoon.

One more piece of the same puzzle. For online sales the CCPC requires that the customer always knows when they are making a payment, which means the order button "must be clearly labelled with words indicating 'obligation to pay' or similar" ^[4]. A button that says Complete or Continue is not doing that job. Get a solicitor to look over the wording of both your terms and your checkout before you rely on either.

Where owners talk themselves into a contract they never had to make

The legal position is usually recoverable. What is harder to recover from is the next twelve hours, when three ordinary reflexes quietly close off your options.

The confirmation email that accepts the order. Most shop software ships with default wording. Received and being reviewed leaves room to cancel a mispriced line. Accepted and being prepared for dispatch reads as acceptance of the customer's offer, and you have just agreed to sell a pump below cost.
Taking payment and dispatching anyway. Once the goods are gone and the money is taken, you are no longer cancelling an order. You are asking a customer for a favour.
Charging the higher amount quietly. Do not. Citizens Information is explicit that it is an offence for a trader to knowingly charge more than the price displayed ^[2]. Tell them the real price and let them choose.

I once told a customer their order confirmation was "just an automated receipt". It read: your order has been accepted and is being prepared. That is not a receipt, that is an acceptance, and they ended up honouring a run of orders they did not have to. I read the default emails properly now, before anyone sells anything.

"As soon as possible" is an operations problem, not a legal one

This is the part I care about most, because it is the part that has nothing to do with solicitors.

Every obligation above assumes you can change a number on your own website quickly. Correct the price before they pay. Fix the mistake as soon as possible. Both of those sentences are written as though editing your own product page is trivial.

For a lot of businesses it is not. The price lives in a PDF price list that somebody has to re-export, which is one of several reasons a PDF is a poor home for anything that changes. Or the site was built by somebody who is not answering, and the change request goes into an inbox with an hourly rate attached. Maybe nobody can remember which of three places on the site carries the figure: the product page, the homepage banner, and the sale page that somebody built for the promotion.

That gap between noticing and fixing is where the money goes. Not in the legal argument, which you will probably win. In the run of orders that landed between the moment you spotted the decimal point and the moment the corrected page went live, each one a phone call, an apology, and a customer who now knows your prices are unreliable. That is the expensive part, and it is entirely within your control.

Which is an argument for owning the thing outright. Full WordPress access from day one means the person who spots the error is the person who can deploy the correction, in minutes, on a phone, without waiting on anybody's callback. It also means you can rehearse a price change in a staging environment before it touches production, which is a habit worth building if you run promotions at any scale. The decision to publish prices at all is a separate one, and worth thinking through properly, but once they are published they become live commercial commitments that need to be as editable as your opening hours.

Correct first, contact second. Doing it in the other order costs you the orders that land in between.

Fixing a Wrong Price in Four Steps

Correct the page first. Change the number everywhere it appears, including any banner, sale page or downloadable list, before you talk to a single customer. Orders keep arriving while you draft the apology.

Verify what the customer actually sees. Load the page the way a buyer would, on a phone, not signed in as the administrator. Caching means the corrected figure sometimes takes a moment to reach the public version of the page.

Pull the affected orders and decide once. Cancel and refund in full, or honour them, but apply the same answer to everybody who ordered in that window. Splitting the difference by customer is how a pricing error becomes a reputation story.

Contact every buyer directly, in writing. Explain that the price was displayed in error, state the correct price, confirm the refund if you are cancelling, and keep the message short. Most people are reasonable about a decimal point.

What none of this protects you from

Time to be straight about the limits, because a cancellation clause is not a magic word.

That clause covers a genuine or obvious pricing error. It does not cover a price you left up for a fortnight, took money on, shipped against, and then reconsidered when the margin looked thin. The words genuine and obvious are doing real work in that sentence, and the further you drift from a decimal point that was live for six hours, the weaker your position gets. Worth remembering too that if you honour the sale, the customer's separate right to cancel an online purchase within 14 days of receiving the goods still stands ^[6].

There is a harder limit as well. If the same tempting error keeps recurring at the same tempting price, you have stopped making mistakes and started running a promotion you do not intend to fulfil. That is misleading advertising, which the CCPC treats as a different and more serious matter than a slip of the thumb ^[3]. Once is a mistake. Every quarter is a pattern, and patterns get noticed.

And an honest concession. If your entire online catalogue is three or four fixed-price items you never discount, a locked-down hosted shop builder where pricing lives in exactly one field and there is nothing to misconfigure genuinely removes this category of risk. Fewer moving parts, fewer ways to fat-finger a figure. That trade stops paying the moment you carry a real catalogue, run seasonal pricing, or want trade and retail prices on the same site, because then the thing you need is control, not fewer buttons.

The part worth taking away

Selling online is no longer a minority activity for Irish firms. The CSO's Information Society survey found that roughly two in five enterprises had e-commerce sales in 2025, and even among small enterprises the figure sat around a third ^[5]. Every one of those businesses now has prices published in a place where a single keystroke reaches every customer at once.

The law, as it turns out, expects mistakes. It gives you room to correct one, on the condition that you tell people and move quickly. Both of those conditions are about what happens in the hours after you notice, which makes this less a legal question than a question about whether you can reach your own price fields without asking permission.

Open your site tonight and time yourself changing one price. If that takes longer than a few minutes, or if it needs somebody else, you already know which part to fix first.

Frequently Asked Questions

If my website showed the wrong price, do I have to sell at it?

Not automatically. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission states that where a price indication is wrong and the marked price is lower than the price charged, there is no obligation on the shop to offer the item at the lower price. Citizens Information puts it the same way for consumers: the trader does not automatically have to sell at the lower price. Two conditions come attached. You must tell the customer the correct price before they pay, and you must correct the mistake as soon as possible.

Can I just charge the higher price to the card instead?

No. Citizens Information is explicit that it is an offence for a trader to knowingly charge more than the price displayed. The correct sequence is to tell the customer the real price and let them decide whether to go ahead at that price or walk away. Quietly taking a larger amount than the page showed is the one response that turns an honest mistake into a legal problem.

What should my terms and conditions say about pricing errors?

Citizens Information notes that online contract terms often reserve the right to cancel a transaction where there has been a genuine or obvious pricing error. A clause along those lines, written in plain language and available to the customer before they check out, is what you rely on when it happens. The CCPC expects consumers to be able to review your full terms before an online contract is concluded, so a link buried in the footer that nobody passes on the way to payment is doing less work than you think. Have a solicitor cast an eye over the wording.

At what point is the sale actually agreed on an online shop?

That depends on what your own website says, which is why the wording of your order confirmation email matters so much. An email that says the order has been received and is being reviewed leaves you room to cancel a mispriced line. An email that says the order has been accepted and is being prepared for dispatch reads as acceptance. Most shop software ships with default wording that nobody ever reads, and the default is usually the second one.

Does a customer still have a right to cancel if I honour the wrong price?

Yes. Buying online is a distance contract, and Citizens Information confirms a 14 day cooling off period running from the day the customer physically receives the goods, with no reason required. Some categories are excluded, including personalised or custom made products and goods that spoil quickly. Honouring a mistake does not close the transaction down, so factor the return window into any decision to absorb the loss.

How quickly do I have to fix an incorrect price on my site?

Citizens Information says traders must correct the mistake as soon as possible, and the CCPC's advertising guidance requires you to inform the customer of an incorrect price before the transaction takes place. Neither sets a number of hours, and neither has to. Every additional hour the wrong figure stays live produces more orders you will have to unwind by phone, so the practical deadline is set by your order volume, not by the wording.