The advent of the Internet has allowed many people to start up business buying and selling. These people are often not trained in business, so don’t know all the laws that govern them. Without commercial lawyers to help them they can easily break a consumer law without realising it, but ignorance is not considered an excuse, so they may still find themselves in trouble.
Since many of those Internet businesses are to do with selling goods of some kind to the public, here are 7 tips on Australian Consumer Law (ACL) that you may not have known, if you are a new start-up business.
- If a customer finds a small defect or flaw in the good they purchased, they can ask for a refund, repair or replacement. Most will want the former, but in fact, your customer must accept the free repair if it is offered to them. It is only if the flaw makes the product dangerous or unsafe, if the product is different from what was advertised or displayed, if the product can’t be fixed easily or if the person would not have bought the product had they known about it, that your business must replace or refund it.