Thanks Hammyuk for making us aware of this, much appreciated.
Just to set the story straight I work for UK Bike Store and I’m afraid the original poster has been giving a grossly inaccurate version of events.
The customer ordered from us on Saturday, the fork was delivered to him on Tuesday. The then phoned up and asked if we would price match Merlin. At no point did we say he couldn’t send it back for a refund, quite to the contrary and it was for that reason that, after quite a bit of pressure from the customer, we gave in and said we would match it – it would be better to match it and not make much on it than have it come back for a refund and loose our shipping costs.
However I noticed when doing the price match that Merlin didn’t actually have the fork in stock and we wouldn’t price match on something that is out of stock, let alone something that the customer had already received from us so I let him know that we wouldn’t be refunding the difference. As mentioned it also wasn’t clear that it was the same fork as we don’t deal in grey market while merlin often do and the product doesn’t mention the Marzocchi aftermarket 3 year warranty.
He then came back to us saying that they did have one in stock despite the site saying otherwise and he had already ordered it but wanted us to either knock something off his order and he would send the merlin one back or pay for his return shipping! We refused to do either but at no point did we say he couldn’t send it back for a refund, it was made quite clear all along that it wouldn’t be a problem and we even emailed him the returns address. We offer more returns period than the statutory minimum and often will go beyond what our terms say to help people out but this guy is clearly taking the piss. Will be interesting to see if the fork does actually get sent back to us or if the one supposedly coming from Merlin turns out to be imaginary and so he decides to keep it.