Comment by _puk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _puk | Hacker News Reader

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As long as it's within 30 days..

Consumer laws give a much longer window, and the retailer is responsible for resolving the issue [0], but any time I've had to try and get something replaced after the time limit it's involved going back to the original seller, hoping they still exist in the world of random TM company names. Never understood how Amazon gets away with this.

0: https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-do-i-do-...

"The retailer is responsible If what you’ve bought doesn’t satisfy any one of the three criteria outlined above, then the retailer that sold it to you is in breach of the Consumer Rights Act.

This means that your statutory consumer rights are against the retailer – the company that sold you the product – not the manufacturer."

I've had Amazon refund me even a full year after purchase, no problem. Basically you go on chat, say you have a problem with some item, they say "please contact manufacturer" to which you say "I'd like you to resolve this problem under the consumer rights act as you are the retailer who sold me this product" and 10/10 times they just go "ok, would you like a refund or a replacement". Then I have the refund 10 minutes later. I've had hundreds and hundreds of orders from Amazon in the last few years and this hasn't failed me once.

This is essentially the same as the EU laws. However, my experience in the UK (pre-Brexit) is that these kind of laws are commonly ignored, For example, the same (EU) laws require that the full price is always displayed up front and that you can't tack on costs later. But e.g. ebay.co.uk has it hiding behind some link with some misleading language that makes it appear as if selling stuff is free (it's not). None of the other EU ebay.tld sites had that when I checked at the time: they always displayed the price on front.

I also had some other service where they advertised a particular price, and after filling in my personal details to order the service there was suddenly an extra mandatory charge which doubled the total price. wtf?! This was 100% illegal. I stopped as that was too much for me and they even had the guys to call me out of bed in the weekend to try and sell me their stupid stuff. I gave an unfiltered version of my opinion on that.

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