LG have been forced to backtrack and remove a restriction that allowed customers only 72 hours from delivery to report any damage by the consumer group Which?
The terms stated that customers had to report any damage to products within three days of delivery, or LG would assume that the damage had been caused after safe delivery.
Which? thinks that this term could be a breach of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (CRA), which states that the quality of goods bought by consumers must be satisfactory and that retailers’ T&Cs cannot restrict this responsibility.
Which is fine, except that most online sellers will give some sort of timeframe for people to inspect for damage and to report it, often only 1-3 days or so and this is, to our knowledge, an extremely common practice and has been for some time. The thinking being that, once the goods are outside the care of the retailer, they have no idea what is happening to them, how they are treated, moved, and so on and therefore can’t really be reasonably expected to accept costs for damages incurred once they have no control over these factors.
We’d not think it was reasonable of Which? to think otherwise.
The example they give of a customer getting a new LG washing machine for later installation, opening the package nine days later to find what can only be described as major transit damage, is unusual in both the time taken and, the severity of the damage described would suggest that it should have been noticed much sooner.
So whilst LG may well have U-turned on this one and, updated their terms to remove this restriction, we don’t think they had to. Most probably, LG didn’t want the hassle and just made this go away.
Our advice as always been to inspect anything you buy as soon as possible for damage, missing items and such, then report any problems immediately. That way, you wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.
