Day thirty-three. The laptop you bought new — the one that was supposed to last — freezes on the login screen and stays there, fan whining, going nowhere. You had thirty days from the day it arrived to reject a faulty item outright and get your money back under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. You are on day thirty-three. Right now that feels like the whole story. It isn’t.
The shop’s chat window is the first wall. A polite line appears: our returns window is 30 days, please contact the manufacturer for a warranty repair. It sounds official. It is not the law. A retailer’s own returns policy and your statutory rights are two different things, and the second one does not shut at midnight on day thirty.
The Act builds a staircase, and you are simply one step down from where you started. In the first 30 days there is the short-term right to reject: hand the goods back, get a full refund. Miss that window, as you have, and you move to the next step — one repair or one replacement, at the trader’s cost, done within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience to you. If that repair fails, or the replacement fails too, you reach the final right to reject: a refund, or a price reduction if you would rather keep the thing. And within the first six months, for anything that isn’t a motor vehicle, they cannot dock that refund for the weeks you actually used it.
There is a quieter advantage buried in those first six months, and it is the one shops rarely mention. If a fault appears within six months of delivery, the law treats it as having been there all along. The trader has to prove it wasn’t — not you. You do not have to explain thermodynamics or reverse-engineer a motherboard. You have to describe what happened, and when.
None of this needs a solicitor, and the sensible first moves are free. Citizens Advice runs a consumer service that will talk you through your position and, where it matters, pass the case to Trading Standards. If the trader still won’t move, they should point you toward a certified alternative dispute resolution scheme — mediation, rather than a courtroom. The county court’s small claims track, for claims up to £10,000 in England and Wales, sits at the end of that road, not the start of it.
But every one of those routes asks the same first thing of you. Put it in writing. Not a chat message that scrolls into nothing. Not a phone call nobody logged. A letter.
And the letter has to do specific work. It has to name the fault plainly. It has to say when the goods arrived and when the problem showed itself. It has to cite the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and state which remedy you are exercising — repair, replacement, price reduction, or the refund — and set a clear date by which you expect a reply. It helps to note the deadlines that bind the other side: once a trader agrees you are owed a refund, it must be paid within 14 days, and by the same means you paid in the first place. A page that says all of this, calmly and in order, is worth more than a week of arguing in a chat box.
That is the point where most people stall. They know they are right. They just don’t know how to make the page sound like it knows too. The blank document is its own small deadline, and it wins more of these than any shop ever does.
That is where Chris comes in. Tell Chris what you bought, when it arrived, and what went wrong. Chris asks the questions that actually decide the outcome — the delivery date, the first sign of the fault, whether anyone has already attempted a repair — and turns your answers into a finished letter: your fault, your dates, the right part of the Act, the remedy you have chosen, and the deadline for a reply. You read it. You send it. It is yours, in your name, in plain English.
The fan is still whining on the desk. But the next move is no longer a shrug into a chat window. It is a letter that knows exactly what it is asking for.
Come back the day it arrives faulty, or the day the reply doesn’t — Chris will be here either way.