The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that price-matching claims made by Ocado, the online supermarket, failed to meet its rules on truthfulness when drawing comparisons with Tesco's web site. Tesco complained to the ASA after it had found that Ocado was more expensive than Tesco on 601 out of 3,811 products that Ocado claimed to price-match. Ocado's system of 'scraping' Tesco.com's web site once a week, often during the early hours of the morning, meant that Ocado's price claims were often inaccurate. Price changes made by Tesco during the course of a day could mean that Ocado's data was out of date within hours. Whilst the ASA acknowledged that Ocado had tried to implement a fair system and recognised the difficulties posed by Tesco's failure to include correct barcodes on some of its items, it was Ocado's responsibility to ensure all common products were appropriately checked and could be substantiated. The ASA concluded that Ocado's advertisements were likely to mislead consumers and told Ocado not to repeat its claims whilst operating under its current systems. The ASA did, however, indicate that Ocado's plans to introduce a time stamp as well as a date stamp on its comparisons would fix the problem of daily price changes resulting in inaccurate claims.
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