The ban on sales on specified holidays applies only to sales, and all its stages will take place directly in a specific store with a sales area of more than 200 square meters.2. Delivery of ordered online purchases does not fall under this prohibition.
This is how the recent ruling of the Supreme Administrative Court (NSS) in another dispute between the Alza.cz online store and the Czech Trade Inspection (ČOI) can be summarized. In it, the court ruled in favor of the online store, which defended itself against a fine for violating the ban on holiday sales. Server Seznam Zprávy was the first to draw attention to the decision (7 As 229/2020 – 32).
The case concerns the purchase of a controller, in which the inspector at the Alza.cz store in Holešovice in Prague ordered a computer mouse directly on the computer at the enterprise on December 26, 2018, then immediately paid for the order and received the mouse. from the seller. ČOI later fined Alza 500,000 CZK for allegedly violating the ban on holiday sales.
In principle, the current provision does not contain anything new. In it, the Court cites at length from its similar decision of July 2021 (4 As 349/2020 – 63). Until then, he agreed with the legal interpretation of Alza, who defended himself against punishment by claiming that the delivery of goods at the branch is not a sale.
So the NSS states again that “…the conclusion of the purchase contract is only one stage of the sale, and therefore the prohibition of sales established by law regarding the period of sale should be applied only in the case of all stages of the sale taking place in a physical store (the whole sale is actually done In store) “.
And when issuing goods purchased on the Internet in accordance with the NSS “… the enterprise acts only in a figurative sense as a kind of imaginary “distribution window” through which the ordered goods are issued in the online store. This service can be likened to the services of traditional postal order services, or other intermediaries For logistics services, whose activities are undoubtedly not subject to the prohibition provided for in Article 1, paragraph 1 of the Sales Period Act.
So the NSS overturned the judgment of the Municipal Court in Prague, which sided with ČOI, as well as the decision to inspect the fine. Meanwhile, ČOI ordered CZK 24,000 to be paid to Alza as compensation for the costs of court proceedings.
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