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THE NATURE OF THE LEGAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CONSUMER, THE WEBSITE OPERATOR AND THE MERCHANT WHEN CONCLUDING THE CONTRACT ON THE DISCOUNT WEBSITE
Abstract
The article focuses on one of the basic questions when concluding a contract on the discount website – what is the nature of the legal relationship, i.e. which party actually enters into a binding agreement with the consumer and thus accepts the obligations specified therein. The consumer buys vouchers at the discount website run by operators who are in a legal relationship with the merchant. The discount website operator receives the money from the consumer, keeps a certain amount as a provision and the outstanding amount is sent to the merchant. The consumer then asks the merchant to provide the service or goods offered. The practical problem however is the nature of the legal relationship between the consumer and these two other parties. There can be two types of discount website operators. The first one is a normal internet shop which sells discount vouchers and thus acts as a seller. The other (second) type is a website operator who declares to act only as an intermediary between the consumer and the merchant. The discount website operator in this case declares that he offers his service purely on a basis of a mandate contract which in the end means that he is basically not liable for anything. This is however connected to another problem – merchant's non-performance or malperformance of the service/goods and insufficient quantity or poor quality. The article identifies and analyses the possible legal and practical solutions when dealing with this problem. The research for this paper was financially supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GACR), grant no. P408/14-27757S.
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