Consumer Guarantee Lawyers in Melbourne

“Warranty expired” is not the end of your rights

The fridge died at 26 months. Maybe the car has been back to the dealer four times for the same fault, or the renovation trade took your deposit and delivered work you are now paying someone else to redo. Then you complained and were told the warranty has run out, or that store policy is repairs only, or that it is the manufacturer’s problem now.

None of those answers is the law. Every product and service sold to you in Victoria carries consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law, and any attempt to exclude them, by warranty card, store policy or contract, is void. That is what separates a guarantee claim from an ordinary breach of contract claim, where the written terms are the whole of the bargain. Here the law writes terms in over the top of whatever you signed. Goods must be of acceptable quality, fit for purpose and true to their description. Services must be done with due care and skill in a reasonable time. The guarantees apply when you paid $100,000 or less, or whenever the goods are the household kind, whatever the price. They run for as long as a reasonable buyer would expect given what you paid, which for a $3,000 television is a lot longer than the warranty card says.

If a Melbourne trader is stonewalling you, call 1800 130 120 before you accept the repair, the credit note or the brush-off. The first call is free, and it usually tells you in fifteen minutes whether the law lets you demand more.

Major or minor failure decides who chooses the remedy

Everything in a guarantee dispute turns on this classification, and sellers have every reason to keep it blurry.

Major failure: you choose

If a reasonable consumer would not have bought the goods knowing the truth, if they are unsafe, substantially unfit for purpose, or significantly different from the description or sample, the failure is major. You pick the remedy: a full refund, a replacement, or keeping the goods and recovering the drop in value. Store credit is not on the list unless you want it to be. You can also recover consequential losses that were reasonably foreseeable, such as the hire car while the faulty one sat at the dealership.

Minor failure: the seller gets first go

For a smaller defect the seller chooses between repair, replacement and refund, and most choose repair. The catch that protects you: the remedy must arrive within a reasonable time. If the repair drags on, fails, or the fault keeps returning, the failure escalates and the choice swings back to you. Keep every receipt, booking and email, because that paper trail is what converts “still waiting” into a refund.

One warning: the right to reject goods does not last forever. The law closes it once a reasonable rejection period passes. Sitting on a fault for a year while the trader stalls can cost you the refund option altogether, which is the main reason we tell people not to keep waiting politely.

The enforcement path: letter, Consumer Affairs Victoria, then VCAT

Most claims we run never see a hearing room. The sequence that works: a written demand to the trader stating the failure, the right relied on and the remedy you have chosen, with a deadline. If that is refused, Consumer Affairs Victoria offers free conciliation for many consumer disputes. If the trader still will not move, we file a goods and services claim at VCAT, where the application fee is under $200 for claims up to $15,000, and you have six years from the dispute to apply. Claims against a manufacturer for damages are tighter: three years from when you became aware of the failure.

We scale our involvement to the money at stake. For a small claim we may only draft the demand letter and brief you on how a VCAT consumer dispute is run, so you can take it from there yourself. For a $70,000 caravan, a defective vehicle or a failed solar installation, we run the file end to end. Either way we scope your matter on the free first call, and if the claim is not worth involving lawyers we say so and point you to the free CAV pathway instead.

Make the trader take you seriously

By the time a refund has been refused twice, the argument has usually stopped being about the law and turned into a question of who gives up first. If you are done being passed around a call centre, phone 1800 130 120 or use the form on this page. Guarantee claims are bread and butter for our consumer law lawyers, and where the trader hides behind one-sided terms, the same file often supports an unfair contract terms challenge as well. The first call is free, and you will come off it knowing what to demand and what your next move is if they say no.