The Six Months Where You Have to Prove It
Most software that handles a faulty product treats the question as one of fact: what came back, when, and what did we give them. Part 3 of Singapore's Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act 2003 treats it as one of proof. For six months after delivery, goods that do not conform are taken not to have conformed when they were handed over — and it is the seller who has to establish otherwise. The record that matters is therefore not what your technician found. It is the date of delivery, the thing delivered, and a dated account of what was asked for and when.
The short version, first
This is not a warranty and not a returns window. It is a rebuttable presumption with a six-month life, running from the date the goods were delivered to the consumer, and it moves the burden of proof onto the supplier. The consumer's first-line remedies are repair or replacement, and the obligation is to provide one within a reasonable time and without causing significant inconvenience — where "reasonable" and "significant" are defined by reference to the nature of the goods and the purpose for which they were acquired, and by nothing else. There is no number in the Act. Our till can express a replacement and a rescission cleanly, expresses a price reduction on goods the customer keeps not at all, and a repair is not a till transaction in the first place. Our ticket, which is where a repair would live, holds a customer and no goods.
A presumption, not a warranty
Section 14(1) sets three conditions: the buyer deals as a consumer, the goods did not conform to the contract at the time of delivery, and the contract was made on or after 1 September 2012. Non-conformity is not defined afresh — section 13(4) borrows it, pointing at the implied terms of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 for a sale, the Supply of Goods Act 1982 for a supply or transfer, and the Hire-Purchase Act 1969 for a hire-purchase agreement. So what counts as a fault is settled elsewhere, and this Part is about what happens next.
Then section 14(3) does the interesting thing. Goods which fail to conform at any point within six months starting after the date of delivery <em>must be taken not to have conformed at that date</em>. Read the direction of that carefully. It is not saying the consumer has six months to complain. It is saying that a fault appearing in month five is presumed to have been there in week one, and section 14(4) lets the supplier out only by establishing that the goods did conform then, or by showing the presumption is incompatible with the nature of the goods or of the fault. Wear and consumables are the obvious second limb. Everything else is an evidential problem for the seller.
Six phrases from Part 3, and what each one commits you to
The phrase What it means, and what it demands of a record
Deals as consumer Who the Part protects
Construed under Part 1 of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, and under section 13(3) it is for the seller to show that the buyer does not so deal. A second burden, before the first one is even reached.
Does not conform What counts as a fault
A breach of an express term, or of a term implied by the Sale of Goods Act 1979, the Supply of Goods Act 1982 or the Hire-Purchase Act 1969, depending on the shape of the transaction. Which statute applies depends on what kind of contract you wrote.
At the time of delivery The moment being judged
The state of the goods when they reached the consumer — not when the fault appeared and not when it was reported. The date of delivery is the anchor for everything else in the Part, including the six months and the use-based reduction on a rescission.
Within a reasonable time The deadline, unquantified
Determined by reference to the nature of the goods and the purpose for which they were acquired, under section 15(5). There is no number, which means a fixed target cannot be right and a target that varies by product can be.
Without significant inconvenience The parallel obligation
Joined to the reasonable time by "and", so a repair delivered on time in a way that puts the consumer out is still a breach of section 15(2)(a). Judged against the same two facts about the goods and their purpose.
Disproportionate How the remedies are compared
One remedy is disproportionate to the other where its costs are unreasonable in comparison, weighing the value the goods would have if conforming, the significance of the fault, and whether the other remedy avoids significant inconvenience. A comparison of two costed options, not a threshold.
Two of these — deals as consumer, and conformity at delivery — put the burden on the seller in terms. The last one is the only place in the Part where a figure is called for, and the figure it wants is not the price you charged: it is what the goods would have been worth had they been right, weighed against the cost of each way of putting them right.
Four remedies, and one of them is not a transaction
Section 14(2) gives the consumer two first-tier remedies and two second-tier ones. Repair and replacement come first. A price reduction or rescission becomes available only where section 15(3) rules both of the first pair out, or where the seller was asked for one of them and is in breach of the reasonable-time-and-no-significant-inconvenience requirement. That ordering is the whole procedural spine, and it means the escalation trigger is a date — the day the seller ran out of reasonable time — rather than a decision anybody makes.
The four remedies against what this product can currently express
| The remedy | A record exists for it | Linked to the original sale | Has a deadline on it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Replace the goods | Yes | Yes | No |
| Rescind — return the goods, refund the money | Yes | Yes | No |
| Reduce the amount paid, consumer keeps the goods | No | No | No |
| Repair the goods | Partly — configurable by you | No | Partly — configurable by you |
| Record which of the four was asked for, and when | Partly — configurable by you | No | No |
| Record the date the goods were delivered to the consumer | Partly — configurable by you | Yes | No |
| Identify the individual unit that failed | Partly — configurable by you | No | No |
Built and maintained Configurable by you, not maintained by us Not built
The first two rows are genuinely good: a return carries a reason, a refund tender, a restock decision and — for a replacement — a link to the sale that replaced it, all against the original sale line. The third row is the honest gap: a return line takes a quantity and restocks by default, so a reduction in price on goods the consumer keeps has nowhere to go. The fourth is the one this whole post is about.
A repair is not a till transaction. The goods leave, something happens to them, and the same goods come back — which is a job with a duration, not an exchange of value. The place in this product where a job with a duration lives is the support ticket, and a ticket is a very good record of a conversation: a reference, a queue, a requester, a customer link, a priority, a first-response clock, a resolution clock, a count of how many times it has been reopened, and a signature at the end saying the requester agrees the work is done. What a ticket has no field for is the thing that broke.
The one clock in this product that is allowed to have no number
A ticket's targets live on its category, in minutes: a first-response target and a resolution target, with a switch choosing whether they run on elapsed time or on the organization's business hours. That makes a deadline a property of the queue the ticket landed in. Section 15(5) makes it a property of the goods and why they were bought — a fridge in a restaurant and the same fridge in a flat are not the same reasonable time, and no category can hold that difference. This is the mirror image of the other Singapore statute we looked at this week: <a href="/blog/a-day-that-skips-only-the-holidays">the security-of-payment Act</a> is nothing but numbered periods, and the hard part there is the unit they are counted in. Here there is no period at all, and the hard part is that a defensible target has to be derived from the item.
What the presumption asks you to be able to show
Two of the three we hold somewhere and one we do not hold at all. The delivery date exists on the sale — for a counter sale it is the sale itself. The request exists as a ticket. The unit is the missing link, and it is missing at both ends: a sale line records an item and a quantity rather than a serialised unit, and a ticket records no goods of any kind.
A returns window asks the customer to prove they are inside it. A presumption asks the seller to prove the goods were sound. The dates involved are the same dates; who has to produce them is not.
What we hold, and what a claim needs
One faulty product, two records that never meet
What the sale side holds
The transaction, completely
- A sale number, the cashier, the total and the payment status, timestamped
- A customer, where one was attached — optional at the till
- Each line as an item and a quantity at a price
- A return against a specific sale line, with a reason and a refund tender
- A restock decision, and for an exchange a link to the replacement sale
- For serialised stock, a unit with a supplier, a purchase order, a received date and a warranty expiry
What the support side holds
The job, completely
- A reference, a subject, a description and a queue
- A requester by name and email, and a link to a customer record
- A first-response and a resolution clock, with a breach marker on each
- A pause while the ticket waits on the requester, resuming with the time it had left
- A count of how many times the job has been reopened
- A signature at the end, saying the requester agrees the work is done
Both halves are solid and neither knows what the other is about. The seam is the physical unit: the sale line names an item rather than a unit, the serialised unit knows its supplier but not its customer, and the ticket names neither. Custom fields will let you write a serial number onto a ticket and onto a sale today, reportable and exportable on both — which gives you the value on both sides and still no join between them, because a custom field is a value and not a foreign key.
A dated record of the complaint, with clocks and an audit trail
A support ticket, with a first-response and a resolution target, a pause that preserves remaining time, a reopen count and a resolution signature.
A replacement recorded as a replacement
A return against the original sale line carrying a reason and a refund tender, with an exchange linked to the sale that replaced it.
An individual unit with its own history
A serialised unit carries its supplier, its purchase order, the date it was received and a warranty expiry, with a trace of its movements.
A serial or a delivery date recorded on either record
Custom fields are available on support tickets and on till sales, on the web, the API, reports and exports.
A join from the complaint to the unit that failed
A ticket references a customer and a queue; the unit that came back would be a relation rather than a typed value.
A delivery date on the unit, as against the received date
A serialised unit records when it arrived from a supplier; the day it reached the consumer is what this Part counts from.
A repair target derived from the item rather than the queue
Response and resolution targets live on the ticket category, so the same target applies to every job in that queue whatever the goods were.
A price reduction on goods the customer keeps
A return line carries a quantity and restocks by default, which expresses goods coming back rather than a price coming down.
Three relations and a rate, in that order
The built list above is longer than the unbuilt one, which is unusual and is the point: what is missing here is mostly wiring between things that already exist.
A unit on the sale line
So a serialised item leaves the till attached to the sale that sold it and the customer who took it. One nullable relation on a line that already knows the item.
A delivery date on the unit
Distinct from the date it arrived from your supplier, because that is the date this Part counts six months from. One column, and it is the same column a warranty-from-sale rule would want.
A unit on the ticket
So a repair job names the thing being repaired, and a second failure of the same unit is visible as a second failure rather than as a second ticket.
A target that comes from the item
A resolution target resolved from the goods rather than only from the queue, so a commercial fridge and a domestic one can carry different reasonable times on the same category.
The first three are a relation, a column and a relation, and each is useful on its own — the second settles a warranty question that has nothing to do with this Act. The fourth is the one worth scoping properly, because deciding where a target is resolved from is a design decision rather than a field.
Tell us what your operation needsWhat AWRA OpsHub does today
- A dated support ticket with two clocks, a first-response and a resolution target set per category, each with its own breach marker and its own overdue reporting.
- A clock that pauses while you wait on the customer and resumes with the time it had left, and that refuses to move a deadline which had already passed.
- A resolution signature on a ticket, recording that the person who asked for the work agrees it was done, beside the timestamps that say an agent declared it finished.
- A return against a specific sale line, carrying a reason, a refund tender and a restock decision, with the amounts and the person who processed it.
- An exchange linked to the sale that replaced it, so a replacement is recorded as a replacement rather than as a refund and an unrelated sale.
- A serialised unit with its own provenance, holding the supplier, the purchase order, the date it was received, a warranty expiry and a trace of its movements.
- Custom fields on both support tickets and till sales, so any field this Part needs as a value can be recorded, reported and exported today.
More we can add to your workspace
- A serialised unit attached to the sale line that sold it, and through it to the customer who took it away.
- A delivery date on the unit, distinct from the date it arrived from your supplier, since that is the date the six-month presumption counts from.
- The unit that failed, named on the support ticket, so a repair job is about goods rather than only about a conversation.
- A resolution target derived from the item, so the reasonable time for a repair can follow the nature of the goods rather than the queue the job landed in.
- A price reduction on goods the customer keeps, as a remedy in its own right alongside the return and the exchange.
- A record of which remedy the customer required, and on what date, since that date is what the second tier of remedies becomes available from.
- A repair cost held against the item, which is the figure the disproportionality comparison in section 15(4) is made with.
Where we point you to a specialist
- We will not tell you whether a particular buyer deals as consumer, or whether particular goods conformed to a particular contract. Section 13 sends both questions out to other statutes — the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 for the first, and the implied terms of three different sale and supply Acts for the second, depending on which kind of contract you wrote. A consumer-law practitioner owns that, and it decides whether this Part reaches your transaction at all.
- We will not compute a reasonable time and present it as the deadline. Section 15(5) makes it a judgement about the nature of the goods and the purpose they were acquired for, and the same fault on the same product can be two different answers for two customers. We would rather give you a field that holds your own judgement per product, show the clock running against it, and keep the judgement attributable to a person who made it.
- We hold a position on the presumption, and it is a design position rather than a legal one: a system for this should make the delivery date and the identity of the unit hard to omit, because those are the two facts the seller has to produce and the two most easily skipped at a busy counter. A quotation from us for this work will make both of them required on serialised lines, and we would argue against a specification that left them optional for speed.
The first three items are one relation, one column and one relation, and each pays for itself outside this Act — the second is also how a warranty that runs from the sale date rather than from receipt becomes computable. The fourth is the design conversation, since it decides where a target is resolved from. The fifth is a shape change at the return counter and wants care, because the mechanics of a return are well covered in this product and worth not disturbing. The sixth and seventh follow once a ticket knows which unit it is about.
Four questions for a system that will handle a faulty product
Show me a repair, from intake to hand-back.
What you will probably hear
A ticket, or a work order, with a status trail.
How to read it
Ask what it says the repair was of. Many systems record the job perfectly and record the goods as free text in a description, which is a searchable string rather than a record you can count failures on. If the answer is a custom field, ask whether anything joins that value to the sale.
Where does the delivery date to the customer live?
What you will probably hear
The sale date, or the invoice date.
How to read it
For a counter sale those coincide and for anything delivered later they do not. Ask specifically for a serialised item: whether the unit itself records the day it went out, as against the day it came in from the supplier. The second date is the one most systems have.
Can two products in the same queue have different repair targets?
What you will probably hear
Yes, by putting them in different categories.
How to read it
That works until the number of products exceeds the number of queues you can sensibly run. Ask whether a target can be resolved from the item, because that is the only shape that scales, and it is the shape a deadline defined by the nature of the goods actually needs.
How would we show the goods were sound when we sold them?
What you will probably hear
The sale record, and the technician's notes.
How to read it
The most useful answer names an inspection or a test recorded against the individual unit before it left. Under a presumption, the notes made after the complaint are the weaker evidence, because they describe the goods months later. Ask what the system lets you record about a unit at the moment of dispatch.
Tell us what you are actually being asked to prove
If your obligation is shaped like a presumption rather than a warranty, the useful work is almost never in the remedy — it is in making two dates and one unit hard to leave out. The bookkeeping of a return we have written about at length, in <a href="/blog/pos-returns-exchanges-kenya">the four decisions inside every return</a> and in <a href="/blog/what-a-refund-has-to-undo">what a refund has to undo</a>; the per-unit discipline that makes any of this possible is in <a href="/blog/tyres-batteries-serial-warranty-tracking">serial and warranty tracking</a>.
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