I don't know about the German Ts&Cs, but the UK ones are shown below, with my emphasis added.
Interesting point here, which I've known to confuse both British and German business folks and is worth knowing if you ever have to do business between the two countries because the law relating to contracts is
very different between the two countries.
Firstly an aside, the e-commerce directive means that the contract is made in the country of the customer so in Saskia's case the contract will be determined by German law (the e-commerce directive overrides any
choice of law provisions). Now, the meat of it. In the UK in law the contract is king and, barring any statutory provisions (e.g. unfair trade practices contrary to law) or general rules of legal interpretation, what is written in the contract defines the whole relationship between two parties and the rules governing that relationship. In contrast, in Germany many things that would be explicit contract provisions in a British contract are governed by statute and if there is conflict between the written terms and statute law, statute law wins and it is as if the written terms were not there (except that their existence contrary to law might be taken as evidence of bad faith).
So in this case (
ipso facto operating under German law) it is not what the terms and conditions say about when the order is accepted that would prevail but what German statute says about when an order is treated as accepted. Similarly, how prices changes are managed is highly likely to be part of law in German and, knowing a tiny little bit about the way German law tends to work, I suspect that German law would favour the purchaser. If any of our German participants have experience of this I'd be interested to hear the actual answers.
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