Good spot, I hadn't seen that. That's a blow for consumers because I assume that will open the floodgates for businesses to not fully reimburse when products are returned intact but 'not in original packaging'. The whole point of DSR was to give people protection from buying online because you can't examine goods the same way as you can in a shop. That seems to go directly against that principle. Paragraph 12 could be interpreted differently depending on the type of goods you're buying I suppose - eg most people who buy beds in a shop would expect to 'test' them, could the same be said for a computer game or graphics card?:
Software was and is always excluded from this refund policy everywhere in the world. Same for services.
That's the thing though, would you ask someone in say Scan to go get a 970, open it in front of you, plug it in and check it works? On the flip side though, you can't test if it's functional without opening the box, nor can you tell if it has a particular characteristic - the whine. Although, if they have a display model, then you could argue you treated it as such. But the etailer would probably argue, and refuse to refund you everything. I'd like to know more about why the cards whine in the first place.
Exactly, you probably wouldn't do that in practice for that type of item but you should be allowed to in principle and thus I think consumers should be protected online buying those types of items if they open up the product to use/test it after buying. I don't think they should be penalised (I'm assuming could now happen) should a customer open a 970 at home then request cancellation for example.
As a consumer, I agree but at the same time, the business will then lose money every time someone opens an item and returns it as opened, even if it's immaculate. And then there are some sneaky places that sell items as new when they aren't DSR was definitely better and coil whine would never have been a problem if you had it. Regardless, I can't imagine IXON will be unhappy with his 290.
Well then it is a weird implementation of EU directive if it allows the shop to discount the item price so radically just for opening the box. Elsewhere in EU they cannot refund you less than 100% unless you really damaged the item. Opening the box/seals on the box doesn't count as "damaging the item" here.
