To think this (online) shop should refund me

[mrsfoof]

I bought some things online at the end of May. I paid for first class post and got an email to say the order had been sent the next day. I've just realised that it never arrived so contacted the seller (an online shop, not Amazon / eBay) to ask for a refund.
The seller is refusing to refund because it's been 3 months and this was the first time I'd been in touch. Their reason is because it's too late for them to claim from Royal Mail for the lost parcel. That seems unfair - it's not my fault they can't claim anymore and I've not got the stuff I ordered.
Any ideas? Can I take them to court (seems a bit extreme as the order value was only £50 but I can't afford to lose this)? Annoyingly I didn't pay with PayPal.

Tough. The risk remains with the seller until delivery. A prudent seller looking to mitigate that risk might well check in with the buyer to make sure that the item had been safely received.

Once more for those having trouble with this- if you pay for something and don't receive it the seller has to refund you or send you a replacement. In the absence of an express (reasonable) contractual provision to the contrary, there are no rules as to timescale except that a claim must be brought within 6 years.

If the seller doesn’t know where a parcel is, that is between them and their courier. Until it is delivered to the buyer, it remains the property and responsibility of the seller. In this case the seller might be well advised to amend their terms and conditions and possibly change how they send goods, as well as their record keeping (honestly, keeping delivery details for only six weeks is really shoddy).

But none of that is the responsibility of the buyer.

But… it’s entirely your fault. How was the seller meant to know it wasn’t delivered 3 months ago?

Then they should probably abide by their legal obligations themselves rather than forcing the OP to go down that route

b0llocks to that. Why can’t people just be reasonable and own their own mistakes? For some people it’s always someone else’s fault, never their own. Yes if you want to anally dissect it, like the cats bum mouths on mumsnet love to do, the company might or might not technically be liable according to the law, I have no idea. However, most reasonable and rational people would hold up their hands and admit they’ve handled this badly, it’s been far too long, and not want to create additional charges to a small business. It speaks volumes about how a person chooses to handle this.

Imagine you go into a shop and hand over cash for a scarf. You're handed a sealed bag and you take it and go home. When you get home, you open the bag to find that it only contains some tissue paper, but no scarf.

You go back to the shop.

"Sorry" they say. "Not our fault you didn't open the bag and check in store."

Would you be happy with that?

Why do you think someone should be blamed by a seller for not receiving what they paid for, just because it's an online purchase?

You're inventing the "small business" aspect. OP never said it was anything of the sort.

And even so, it's a business not a charity.

If they had replaced without quibble she'd be more likely to use them again I imagine, or recommend to her friends. They've done themselves a disservice by ignoring the inconvenience of their legal obligations.

By having the appropriate service from their courier of choice. If they didn’t have that, it’s on them. The responsibility to get the item from seller to buyer rests with the seller alone.

Like I say, It speaks volumes about how a person chooses to handle this 🤷‍♀️

But that is nonsense. The entire point of consumer protection law is to protect consumers. Businesses have numerous ways around this, including their own contractual terms.

Businesses are in a much more favourable position than consumers - 99% of the time they are the ones who write the contractual terms and consumers often don’t event read them. But provided they are reasonable and not unlawful the consumer will be bound by them.

This creates a major asymmetry between businesses and the consumer. So if a business wants the consumer to be bound by a particular term (like notifying them within a specified period) then it is on them to include that term in the contract.

A consumer relying on the contract they have with a seller is not being unreasonable.

*Imagine you go into a shop and hand over cash for a scarf. You're handed a sealed bag and you take it and go home. When you get home, you open the bag to find that it only contains some tissue paper, but no scarf.

You go back to the shop.

"Sorry" they say. "Not our fault you didn't open the bag and check in store."

Would you be happy with that?

Why do you think someone should be blamed by a seller for not receiving what they paid for, just because it's an online purchase?*

Now imagine that scenario, but you wait over two months before you go back to the shop. What do you think the sellers response should be then?

Great post @TeaKlaxon.

It doesn't matter whether I went back the same day or 2 months later. The shop gave me an empty bag. How does the timescale change that?

It doesn't matter whether I went back the same day or 2 months later. The shop gave me an empty bag. How does the timescale change that?

But how can you be sure, two months after the fact, that someone else didn't take the item? How will you be able to convince the shop of that?

In my scenario it is a fact that the bag did not contain the item when I left the shop. Are you saying that the shop should get away with taking my money and giving me nothing because I can't prove to them that I am not lying?

And why is it any more likely that I am lying 2 months after the event than 1 hour after the event?

Every single objector to the company simply giving the purchaser what they paid for is starting from the premise that companies need to be protected from liars and scammers and cheeky fuckers who use items and then claim refunds. That the presumption is that a person is lying unless proven otherwise. Don't you see how fucked up that is?

Oh give it a rest 😂

All this talk of court is hilarious.

The bottom line is, if you leave it 3 months before you just happen to notice your order didn't arrive, you shouldn't expect for everyone else to faff around trying to fix it. I don't give a shit about the law, you're unreasonable because it's bloody annoying.

3 months? 🤨

So somehow a scenario where the shop is scamming the customer somehow equates to one where a delivery got lost?

I'm not really sure I understand how the two area related. Or are you suggesting that the online shop didn't actually send the items items in the first place?

And I do find it hard to believe that a) anyone would go back to a shop after two months in that scenario and expect to get a replacement item and b) that the shop would just agree to that.

This thread is getting stupid. I'm leaving it here.

I’m always surprised how anti-consumer this site is. I’ve seen threads of consumers saying they’ve been screwed over by some obscure term of a contract only to be rounded on by people who say they shouldn’t have entered the contract if they didn’t like it.

Yet here, with a small number of exceptions, people don’t seem to think the seller should abide by their contractual obligations.

For the OP though, the easiest route is obviously not court but a charge back through her card. OP - it’s worth flagging to the seller you are doing this, as often sellers will relent and offer a refund to avoid the fees involved in a chargeback.

I personally think the example of a physical shop isn’t a great analogy because different laws apply to distance selling than face to face retail.

But incidentally, while lots of people are speculating that OP could have received the item and just trying it on, no one has speculated on the much more likely scenario which is that the package was returned to the sender who deliberately or accidentally have no record of it coming back.

Why should the OP accept the bona fides of the business? The entire point of consumer protection law is to ensure she doesn’t have to.

This thread is interesting.

Those that say the law allows up to six years - do you think it would be reasonable for someone to get in touch with a seller after five years and eleven months and expect them to send a replacement product for the one that wasn't delivered?

Because they didn't choose to keep records. That is down to them.

Why would you hear about it? It's hardly likely to be reported regularly as headline news.

Perfectly easily: by using the tracking service and keeping records.

No, the bottom line is the law. If you as a seller don't choose to take steps to track what you send, retain records or include clauses in your contract requiring notification of non-delivery, you should expect to pay up without an argument if a buyer tells you they haven't received the goods. There's plenty of faff and "bloody annoying" stuff around running a business, if you don't want to deal with it don't go into business.

I pointed out upthread the situation of a friend who has hardly been at home for three months because her child has been very ill. If she had ordered something in May that hadn't turned up, she wouldn't notice till she gets home, which should be quite soon. Should the seller get away with keeping her money and goods because "it's bloody annoying"?

It's not a question of what would be reasonable. The fact is that it would be extremely difficult to claim, because after that length of time your chances of convincing any court of what happened are pretty tiny. But if you could prove it, and if the seller had no Ts and Cs to prevent it, the buyer has a valid claim - which is in fact more likely to be for the return of payment than the goods themselves.