BarnesandNoble.com TouchPad Offer Class Action Lawsuit

A class action lawsuit filed in Superior Court claims Barnes & Noble tricked consumers into visiting barnesandnoble.com to purchase a discounted HP TouchPad Tablet, only to cancel the deal soon after they purchased one.

According to the class action lawsuit, the so-called liquidation “deal” was merely a scheme to increase website traffic, expose customers to advertising, collect their personal contact information, and get them to purchase other items from the Barnes & Noble website.

On or about the weekend of August 20, 2011, Hewlett-Packard announced it would be discontinuing all of its WebOS devices, which led to a heavy discount in the pricing of its TouchPad Tablet by retailers aimed at liquidating the product. Barnes & Noble advertised on its website that customers could purchase a discounted HP 16 GB TouchPad for an advertised price of $101.95. The class action lawsuit claims Barnes & Noble processed thousands of these orders, sending confirmation emails to buyers, and placing a hold on these buyers’ methods of payments, despite selling out of the TouchPads in a matter of minutes.

“Despite knowing that it could not fill these orders, Defendant continued to lure customers to its website, collect payment information, process all of these orders, authorize charges to customers’ method of payment, which includes credit cards and PayPal accounts, and send each customer a confirmation email solidifying that the offer had been mutually accepted by both the customer and Defendant,” the class action lawsuit states.

“Then, several hours or even several days after the deal was struck, Defendant notified the majority of its customers that it was reneging on the deal, and would not be selling them a discounted TouchPad after all.”

The class action lawsuit says that due to the time-sensitive nature of the nationwide HP TouchPad liquidation, this lag in time between their purchase and the notification that they would not be receiving a TouchPad “caused consumers to forego and miss out on other opportunities to purchase TouchPads at discounted prices from different vendors, after which time TouchPads became unavailable at retail sail, and secondary market prices for TouchPads increased substantially.”

The Barnes & Noble TouchPad class action lawsuit is brought on behalf of all persons who ordered one or more HP TouchPad Tablets from barnesandnoble.com beginning in August 2001 for an advertised discount rate, and later received a cancellation of their order. It is seeking actual, direct, incidental, consequential, and statutory damages for false advertising and unfair competition.

A copy of the Barnes & Noble TouchPad Offer Class Action Lawsuit can be read here.

The case is Kevin Khoa Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, Inc., Case No. 30-2012-00562713-CU-BT-CXC, Superior Court of California, County of Orange.