When a price is displayed incorrectly, sellers sometimes cancel the resulting orders. Whether they can do so depends on when a contract is formed, which varies by jurisdiction.

Display is usually an invitation, not an offer

In many legal systems, a price on a shelf or a webpage is treated as an invitation for the customer to make an offer rather than an offer the customer can accept.

Under that framing, the customer offers to buy at the displayed price and the seller may accept or decline, which is what allows a mispriced item to be refused.

The practical consequence is that seeing a price creates no entitlement to it until the seller has done something that constitutes acceptance.

Acceptance is the decisive moment

What counts as acceptance differs. Taking payment, dispatching goods, or sending a confirmation that is worded as an acceptance can each be sufficient.

This is why order confirmations from online sellers are often carefully worded to acknowledge receipt without accepting the order, preserving the right to cancel.

Once acceptance has occurred, cancelling generally requires a different argument, such as an obvious mistake the buyer could not reasonably have believed.

Obvious errors are treated differently

Where a price is so far from the expected level that any reasonable person would recognise it as a mistake, the buyer's position is considerably weaker.

A modest error is harder for a seller to escape, because the buyer could plausibly have believed it was a genuine promotional price.

The threshold is a matter of judgement rather than a fixed proportion, and it depends on the category and on what a typical price looks like.

Consumer protection sits alongside contract law

Separately from whether a contract formed, displaying prices that are not honoured can raise questions under rules on misleading practices.

Occasional genuine errors are treated differently from a pattern of advertising prices that are systematically unavailable at the till.

Some markets also impose specific obligations about honouring displayed prices in physical shops, which operate independently of contract formation.

What this means in practice

The rules differ substantially between jurisdictions and the outcome in any particular case depends on the specific facts and the terms the seller published.

Terms of sale usually state when acceptance occurs, and reading that clause is more informative than any general expectation about displayed prices.

Where a significant amount is involved and a seller has cancelled after taking payment, the position is jurisdiction-specific enough to warrant proper advice rather than a general rule.