AAA Sports: Summary of key consumer law requirements
- Withdrawal rights: Subject to certain exemptions, consumers have the right to change their mind about online transactions at any time until 14 days after delivery. In respect of physical goods – there are slightly different rules for services and digital content – once a consumer has returned their goods they are entitled to a full refund, including the price of standard delivery.
For your collection, one relevant exemption would include where products are sealed for hygiene reasons, and the product is then opened, then the consumer is unable to change their mind for a refund (we’ve referred to this, and swimwear, in the T&Cs).
Under the law, refunds should be paid back to the same method that the customer paid with.
- Delivery deadline: Unless otherwise agreed (meaning as notified to the consumer as part of the UX flow before they have ordered), consumer law requires that deliveries are made within 30 days from the date the order is made. If there is a longer lead time for a particular product then this needs to be obviously notified to consumers before they make a purchase.
- Pre-contractual information: There is a list of designated items that consumers need to know before place an order. These are mostly obvious, such as the price and key characteristics of what they’re buying. However, there are some other aspects such as the specific retailer entity they’re buying from and that entity’s address / contact details.
Key requirements should be apparent from the order flow, but most businesses put other requirements into their T&Cs which consumers need to agree to when they place an order. We have built these into the T&Cs provided.
- Order flow: There are a number of specific requirements around how consumers purchase. For example, the UX flow needs to be as clear as possible about price throughout the whole order flow. While the final price may not always be known when a consumer is just browsing, due to different delivery options, it should at least be clear to consumers that additional delivery costs will be added later in the flow.
Furthermore, the final 'buy button' must indicate to consumers that they will need to pay. We appreciate this appears self-evident, but guidance clarifies that words such as "pay" and "buy" would be fine, whereas words such as "order" or "confirm" would not.
Consumers should also be to review their whole order and price in one place at the end of the order flow before they commit. We believe WooCommerce has functionality to facilitate this.
- Statutory warranties: There are warranties implied by the law that products sold must comply with. The key ones are a) satisfactory quality, b) fitness for purpose, and c) as described. This means that products as delivered must work, be as advertised and be fit for their apparent purpose. There is also an assumption that issues / faults that develop after delivery were in the product at the time of delivery – meaning that the retailer will still be responsible for remedying such issues. However, from 6 months after delivery, the burden of proof to show that the product breached the warranties at the time of delivery passes to the consumer.
Depending on the amount of time that has passed and the circumstances, remedies available to consumers for products that breach these warranties include repair, replacement and/or a refund.
For these reasons, it is normally important to carefully consider the contractual relationship you have with your suppliers, to ensure you have some recourse against them if you are subject to a claim from your own customers.
- Promotional marketing: There separate and specific rules around promotional marketing and competitions. Very broadly, promotions must not be misleading and the key conditions of a competition or discount scheme should be clearly provided to consumers. However, we are happy to separately advise on the specifics as relevant to the circumstances if any promotions are planned.
- Pricing: There are also specific rules around how sales and discounts are presented to consumers, including on “was pricing” and “strike-through pricing”. In summary, discounts must not mislead consumers. More specifically, previous prices indicated and compared against now-lower prices should be accurate representations of the real previous price (eg if a discount said “£50 NOW £30!” then £50 must have been the lower price for a substantial period before the discount to avoid misleading consumers). Other retailers have been investigated for practices such as raising prices just before a sale to suggest that a sale price offers much better value than it truly does.
