Onerous terms is the third of 10 components of a Trustworthy score. Terms (Terms and Conditions, Terms of Sale, etc.) are a lot of small print written by and for lawyers. Normal people can safely ignore Terms. Because Terms only matter if you end up in court, and then some lawyer will read them for you. 9D
Wrong. There is one thing that a customer needs to find out about an offer, not before they go to court, but before they reach for their credit card:
- How could you return the product and get your money back?
You can’t be sure how a guarantee works unless you check the Terms. I don’t mean read the whole document; it’s mostly rubbish. What to do:
- Some web marketers kindly place their guarantee’s rules in a short separate document named something like Return Policy. If you find this document, you can ignore the Terms.
- If there’s no Return Policy, do a word search for “Return” in the Terms. You could do this in your browser, or copy-and-paste the Terms into a word processor and search them there.
It’s not safe to rely on advertised guarantee terms because:
- What you see in the advertising is sometimes incomplete, and you need to go to the Terms to fill in the blanks.
- Sometimes the advertised terms and the real Terms are different! Could be an honest mistake. Could be they lied. Anyway, the real Terms always win.
Here are the blanks you’ll want to fill in. (Hello, Web sellers! Please read this.)
| guarantee days | guarantee starts when? | ok to open the package? | ok to try the product? | ok to use the product? | restocking fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
- Guarantee days: Should be at least 30, if the guarantee starts when the product is delivered. Longer if it starts when the product is shipped or when you order it.
- Guarantee starts when?: Should be “Delivered” or “Shipped.” If the guarantee starts on the day you order, and the seller is out of stock, every day it takes for the seller to get more stock (from China, usually) is a day of guarantee lost. Also, a seller who’s short of working capital may shelve his orders until he’s collected enough money to pay for a wholesale order (crate, shipping container, etc.) of the product. By the time you get the product, you might not have any guarantee days left.
- OK to open the package?: Should be “Yes.” If it’s “No,” the guarantee days don’t matter, because you can’t look at or test the product. To avoid invalidating the guarantee, you can only store it in its unopened package.
- OK to try the product?: Yes! Not No! Obviously.
- OK to use the product?: I like “yes,” but “no” is understandable. If you test it and you don’t like it, but you don’t damage it, the seller can resell it to somebody else. Of course they could do that even more readily if you didn’t open the package, but that’s just unreasonable; it’s your property.
- Restocking fee: Look out for this hidden cost of an exchange or return.
A few other terms to check:
- Auto-ship | subscription: Does the company have an auto-ship service that automatically ships and charges you for a refill every month? What triggers it, and how would you cancel a subscription?
- Arbitration: If you have a dispute with the company, and you’re limited to requesting individual arbitration to resolve it, then you can’t join a class-action lawsuit or group arbitration. That’s an encroachment of your legal rights.
Other review sections related to Terms:
- If Terms are hard to find, hard to read or very long, I cover that under Chicanery.
- If Terms contradict advertised terms, for example the length of a guarantee, I cover that under Lying and Deception.
Web Scammer Jammer 