Defective Software - Refund under Sale of Goods Act

[RobertBrown]

18 Months ago we purchased a suite of Construction Job Estimating software products for my company intended for use in generating construction industry estimates and customer bills.

Your software was installed and used in accordance with your instructions, but failed to fulfil the functions that it was advertised as being able to perform and was troublesome right from the start, requiring many updates and patches.

Software like this is purchased for the long term and takes a long time to become implemented within the company. Because of the scale of the calculations it performs you begin to rely on it completely for company financial matters. It was only after a period of 18 months that we began to realise that customer bills did not match up to the amount that we had estimating the job cost at. On investigation we revealed some flaws in the software that meant it was generating customer bills with incorrect amounts.

Support requests were made to Worldwide Software in an attempt to resolve the significant errors present in the software. Our support requests were initially met with an outright denial that errors were present and some extremely rude accusations that we were at fault and not the software, followed in the end by an acceptance of the errors and a number of vague attempts to apply fixes by way of software updates, the final one of which caused a total software failure. The final piece of advice given to us was that the faults were unfixable, subsequent to which our phone calls and email support requests went completely ignored.

We have now purchased an alternative product, at a fraction of the cost, that works perfectly. We asked the supplier of the defective software to provide us with a full refund as the software as is not fit for purpose, in accordance with our statutory rights, but they have mailed us refusing to issue a refund, referring us to their 'terms and conditions'.

We feel we have no choice but to take them to Court to obtain a refund, and hopefully compensation for the significant amounts of time and money the defective software has caused us. We would be grateful for any advice that anyone might be able to offer us?

Best regards,

Robert

[labman]

Re: Defective Software - Refund under Sale of Goods Act

Perhaps before taking court action you should direct them to their legal obligations under the Sales of Goods Act. Below is a link which is designed for retailers, so perfect for them!

Make sure you keep the letter / email stating the goods were faulty and that you have a copy of it somewhere just in case.

http://sogahub.tradingstandards.gov.uk/

[enquirer]

Re: Defective Software - Refund under Sale of Goods Act

On the facts given, you have a good case.

As Labman suggests, try a heavy letter first (the courts don't like over hasty litigants), setting out all the defects and a complete chronology of your attempts to resolve the matter with them. Conclude by quoting the law.

I assume that you have copies of all the correspondence, particularly where they refer to the item being 'unfixable'.