Member Comments

I purchased a dell xps laptop for home use in June 2008 for $2300. The warranty finished now 3 months ago. Last week it failed and I rang dell and they said since its out of warranty i'll have to pay $950 to get the motherboard replaced. Am I covered by the CGA? please advise

I purchased two Taylormade R7 fairway woods from http://www.shoppernator.co.nz which were advertised as having serial numbers. This implied to me that they were original equipment and for $249 I assumed that they would be – the R7 is an older model circa 2005. Payment was accepted and the goods appear to have shipped directly from China. The goods supplied are not the items advertised and are a completely different model. The goods also appear to be poor quality counterfeit items without serial numbers and the features of the real thing. Steve Orme at shoppernator.co.nz will only refund if I arrange (at my cost) to ship the goods back to his supplier in China. I believe I have a case under the Fair Trading Act – the way the goods were advertised and under the Consumer Guarantees Act for his reluctance to refund. Next step is the Disputes Tribunal I guess?

I bought a phone for my sister on account, and in true teenage fashion she drew all over the phone and banged it up physically. Two months later all her contacts and messages wiped and the phone does not go. I took it back to Noel Leemings who said that although it was a software issue, they were not bound to fix it as it was physicially damaged. What can I do? They refuse to replace or refund me for the phone.

I had an instance as a result of hiring some equipment it blew the break fuse in my car, so not only did I have to get the vehicle towed but had the cost of essential repairs as well, can i seek any recompense from the hiring company or is this hiring at my own risk, does anyone know? thanks

hi, we ordered a window and slider from a sales agent working for elite aluminium. we asked for the metro series in the slider and was very specific about the type of slider and he knew what we wanted as he had ordered the one we currently had. the sales agent said no problem and went away to do a quote. we got other quotes and his came back very reasonable. so we went ahead and paid the $1,500.00 deposit for the window and slider. however when the goods arrived they werent what we had stipulated, and because we had paid the $1,500.00 we took the window as insurance as we felt we wouldnt get our money back we had already paid otherwise. however we didnt accept the door. we then tried to contact the sales agent over the next 3 weeks to ask him what the issue was. he never returned our calls. we decided we had to go ahead and order the slider from somewhere else because our building was now being held up. we then had to wait another 3 weeks for that slider to be made. after approximately 6 weeks the sales agent got intouch with us re on not accepting the door and admitted he didnt order what we wanted because he thought he would order something similar to save us $1,000.00 and made out he was looking after us. however we were prepared to pay for what we wanted and said we wouldnt be purchasing the door and suggested he should have rung us regarding that 'idea' he had before he ordered something we didnt want. he agreed. then about 3 weeks after that he rang again to see if we wanted the door and we again said no. then another 4-5 weeks went by and we got a random message from him saying we owed him delivery charges of $180 and the rest of the money for the window we accepted. we investigated the cost of the window and it costs approximately $1,200.00, we had paid a deposit for the original quote of $1,500.00 so we thought we were 'even' and werent going to chase him for the extra $300 he made as we had a feeling it would be a waite of our time, and there is nothing about delivery charges on the quote. my husband rang about the situation regarding delivery costs and the sales agent said verbally the window costs $1,700.00 and delivery charges arent on the quote because you dont pay delivery on items over $2,000.00 and since the window was below this we now have to pay the delivery charges. we now have received a letter from his lawyers demanding we pay $451 in 7 days! this originally started back 2/2/10. could you please advise our rights - i suspect he has breached the CGA -not supplying goods and services as per specified and not disclosing delivery charges information on the quote and FTA? i am now getting a written quote from elite for the actual window cost, but am unsure how to or if to respond to his lawyers who are threatening court proceedings at a costs to us! PLEASE HELP!

My Sony hard drive recorder failed with a power-on problem recently. It was 18 months old and 6 months outside the standard one year warranty. I had declined an extended warranty, a point noted prominently on my invoice. So I was thinking, “Here we go. I wonder what kind of grief I need to go through to try the CGA.” To my pleasant surprise, Harvey Norman Northwood couldn’t have been more helpful if they tried. The assistant said he understood my position entirely and would do all he could. The recorder was sent off to Sony who assessed it and repaired it for free. It took a while (about 4 weeks), but I am very happy with the outcome.

We purchased our laptop in mid January 2009. Two weeks later the harddrive failed.We returned the computer to Toshiba who duly replaced the hard drive.Since then we have had another disk failure and 3 DVD drives. All these have been fixed by Toshiba.
But it's just failed again!!! Can we return it to the place we purchased it from and get our money back.? What are our options??

Manufacturers are obviously offering shorter warrantees than they should; it should be somewhere close to the usual lifespan of a product. Many consumers and retailers do not understand the CGA and end up feeling limited to the manufacturer's warranty period.

Why not enforce it from the front end by ensuring the manufacturer warranty is commensorate with the reasonable lifespan of the product. Anything less is surely the manufacturer just trying to worm out of their responsibility and pull the wool over the consumer's eyes. This forces the retailer to take up the slack. The retailer needs to include the cost of post warranty CGA claims in their margins to cover this contingency but consumer will generally not be happy to pay more for this. This way there would be more certainty and everyone would be treated contingency fairly. The last time I tried to claim a replacement/refund under the CGA the retailer (Hill & Stewart) was less than understanding and made me wait for about 30 minutes (with 4 children in tow) before agreeing to even take the defective 1.2 year old dvd player back to be checked out - I explained to them that I was the manager of a retailer so knew the correct procedure under the CGA. I even brought the relevant Consumer Magazine article along to show them but they just didn't seem to know. They even tried to make me sign a return agreement that mentioned I may be charged a service fee if the product was out of warranty. Basically, the unaware retailer and apathetic non-CGA empowered consumer are not allowing the current law to function as it should... Maybe time for an amendment or two? Steven Price (Computer Direct)