The Manufacturer's Guarantee on Your Product Page Is Now Yours

A power tool dealer in Longford takes the call twenty-six months after the sale. The customer's cordless drill has stopped taking a charge, and they are reading the shop's own product page back down the phone: three year manufacturer's warranty, registration required. They never registered. The distributor that brought that brand into the country dropped it last year and has no interest in the conversation.

So the customer asks the only question left. You put that line on the page. Are you standing over it?

Treat that as a composite rather than a specific case. The pattern repeats in Irish shops constantly, and the legal answer barely moves between versions of it. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2022, if you handed a buyer somebody else's guarantee and said nothing else about it, you are liable for that guarantee as though you had written it yourself.

Not the factory. You.

The sentence that moves the liability

Section 41(1) of the Act runs to about forty words and does all of the damage. Where a trader gives a consumer a commercial guarantee provided by another guarantor, the trader is liable to the consumer for the observance of that guarantee as if the trader were the guarantor, unless the trader expressly indicates the contrary when the guarantee is given.

Read the escape hatch slowly, because it is narrower than it looks. Privately thinking of the warranty as the manufacturer's business does not count. You have to indicate the contrary, expressly, at the point the guarantee reaches the customer. Silence is not a disclaimer. It reads as acceptance.

In practice that means the repair sits on your counter and the replacement comes out of your stock, two years after you banked a margin you have long since spent. For years I told retailers that the manufacturer's warranty was the manufacturer's problem and that their job was to pass on the paperwork. That was wrong, and the Act had already said so. I stopped giving that answer once I read section 41 properly.

There is a second half to the section that works in your favour. Under section 41(2), where you give a customer your own commercial guarantee, it is presumed, unless the contrary is proved, that you are not liable under any other guarantor's guarantee you also handed over. A plain twelve month shop guarantee, written by you and meant by you, is a stronger commercial position than a silent repetition of a factory promise you have no control over.

Your product page counts as advertising, and advertising binds

Section 40(1) says the guarantee binds the guarantor on the conditions set out in the guarantee statement and in any associated advertising available at or before the sale. Your product page is advertising. So is the banner, the category blurb, the downloadable spec sheet and the promotional graphic somebody made for a sale in 2023 and never took down.

Section 40(3) is where a tidy filing system turns into money. If the conditions in the guarantee statement are less advantageous to the consumer than the conditions in the associated advertising, the guarantee binds on the more advantageous advertised terms. The only way out is to correct the advertising before the contract is concluded.

Sit with what that means for a catalogue nobody has audited. A line promising a lifetime guarantee on frames, written for one supplier's range and later applied site wide by a template change, is not a typo. It is the offer. The buyer does not have to prove they read it, and you do not get to argue that the real terms were in the PDF.

Those same pages are about to be read by a second rulebook, because the new rules on environmental and durability claims that apply from 27 September 2026 land on exactly this kind of wording. One audit, two problems solved.

Six years, and the guarantee does not get a vote

Owners who treat the warranty period as the clock get caught here. It is not the clock. The CCPC's guide for traders puts it plainly: consumers can seek a remedy for up to six years after they receive the goods, that six year period applies regardless of manufacturer warranties, and guarantees cannot set a time limit on a consumer's rights under the Act.

On the other half of that, the CCPC is careful, and so should you be. What is reasonable to expect in terms of durability varies by the goods, the price, the claims made in advertising and the normal standards of the trade. A loaf of bread is not expected to survive the week. An oven is expected to work for years. The further into the six years a fault appears, the harder it gets for a buyer to show the problem was there at delivery, and that is a case by case judgement rather than a rule you can print.

What the buyer is actually entitled to

Two timings matter more than the rest. Where a lack of conformity shows up within 30 days of the customer receiving the goods, they can end the contract and take a refund, which the CCPC calls the short term right to terminate. If the fault appears in the first twelve months, it is presumed to have existed at delivery, and the burden sits with you to rebut that.

Outside the 30 days, the buyer still chooses between repair and replacement, free of charge. If you refuse, or the repair drags on, or the same fault keeps coming back, the final right to terminate opens up and the refund arrives anyway. Minor faults do not justify ending the contract. Everything else is a conversation you are going to have on your own time.

The two promises, side by side

What the customer asks	The commercial guarantee	Your duty under the Consumer Rights Act 2022
Who do I claim from?	The named guarantor, and you as well, unless you expressly said otherwise when you gave it	You, always. Conformity is the seller's obligation
How long have I got?	Whatever period the guarantee sets	Up to six years from delivery, whatever the guarantee says
What do I get?	Whatever the guarantee promises, as a minimum	Repair or replacement, with refund rights inside 30 days and in defined cases after
Can the small print cut it down?	It can set its own conditions	No. Terms limiting statutory rights are not binding, and giving one is an offence

The clause that turns a guarantee into an offence

Section 45 draws three hard lines. A commercial guarantee may not exclude or limit the consumer's rights under any enactment or rule of law. It may not impose obligations on the consumer beyond the sales contract. And it may not make the guarantor, or anybody acting for the guarantor, the sole authority on whether the goods conform or whether a claim is valid.

Any term that crosses those lines is not binding on the consumer. Under section 45(3), giving a guarantee that contravenes the section is an offence, and section 142 sets the sentencing range: on summary conviction a class A fine or up to twelve months, and on conviction on indictment a fine of up to €60,000 or up to eighteen months.

Prosecutions for a badly worded warranty card are not exactly flooding the District Court, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The enforcement letter is real. So is the CCPC file, and so is the customer who now holds a written record of a business telling them they had no rights. All of it comes from the same instinct that produces a returns page nobody should be running, and it fails for the same reasons a "no refunds" line on your site fails.

Two phrases to hunt for today. "Our decision is final." "This warranty is in place of all other rights." Both are the sole authority problem and the exclusion problem in plain sight.

What the statement has to say, and when it has to arrive

Section 44 is the checklist, and it is short. The guarantee statement must reach the consumer on a durable medium no later than the time of delivery, in concise, plain and intelligible language, and it must include:

• a clear statement that the consumer is entitled by law to free remedies from the trader if the goods do not conform, and that those remedies are unaffected by the guarantee
• the name and address of the guarantor
• the procedure the consumer follows to make a claim
• the goods the guarantee applies to
• the conditions of the guarantee

Note the trap in the first bullet. The statement has to affirm the statutory rights, not merely avoid contradicting them. A silent warranty card fails that test even if every word in it is accurate.

Two details finish the picture. Under section 44(3), getting the statement wrong does not release the guarantor from the guarantee, so a sloppy card costs you the obligation and the compliance problem together. And under section 42, if the goods change hands while the guarantee is still running, the second owner can rely on it against the guarantor or against you, exactly as the original buyer could.

The honest limits, and where a smaller setup wins

Section 41 gives your customer a clean route to you. It does not hand you a matching route back up the supply chain. Whether you can recover a replacement cost from the importer is a question about your trade terms, your purchase orders and your leverage, and none of that is decided by consumer law. If the brand is gone, so is the recovery. That is the part of this nobody enjoys, and it is the strongest argument for writing your own short guarantee rather than parroting a long one.

The specifics of any individual claim depend on the goods and the contract, so take advice on your own situation before rewriting anything that is currently in dispute.

A genuine concession. If you sell five products from a hosted store builder and the catalogue has not changed in two years, this is a ten minute job on any platform, and the walled garden costs you nothing today. The bill arrives later, when a rule changes and the fix needs to be one reusable block applied across 400 product pages rather than 400 manual edits, and the template will not let you do it. That is the trade you are making when the platform owns the layer your legal wording lives in.

For everyone else, the cost of this is measured in access. A guarantee rewrite is a text edit. It should not involve an agency ticket, an hourly rate and a wait, and it certainly should not involve asking permission. That is the practical case for running the site on full WordPress with the keys in your own hand and the whole thing fixed at €60 a year, rather than paying by the hour every time the law moves.

Conclusion

The wording under your buy button is not a formality supplied by somebody else. It is an offer, made by you, on terms you chose to publish, and Irish law reads it that way whether you wrote it or pasted it.

So the useful work this week is small and unglamorous. Open the product pages, read the guarantee lines as though a customer were quoting them back to you in twenty-six months, and decide which of those promises you actually intend to keep. Then say that, in your own words, and let the manufacturer's paperwork be the manufacturer's paperwork.

Frequently Asked Questions

If the manufacturer refuses a warranty claim, does the customer have to accept it?

No, and this is the part most people get backwards. The customer's rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2022 run against the seller, not the factory. In the CCPC's words, a business should offer a repair, replacement or refund whether there is a guarantee or warranty or not, and even if the guarantee has expired. Separately, section 41 can make you liable for the manufacturer's guarantee itself where you gave it to the customer without expressly saying otherwise.

Can I just say "warranty claims are handled by the manufacturer" on my site?

You can indicate that you are not taking on the manufacturer's guarantee, and section 41(1) requires you to do that expressly, when the guarantee is given. What that wording cannot do is move your own obligations. Conformity of the goods is the seller's responsibility under the Act, so a customer with a faulty product still comes to you regardless of what the warranty page says.

How long am I actually on the hook for?

Up to six years from when the customer received the goods, according to the CCPC's guidance for traders, and that period is unaffected by any manufacturer warranty. In practice the argument gets harder for the buyer as time passes, because they have to show the fault existed at delivery, and what counts as reasonable durability depends on the product and the price.

Does a two year guarantee mean I can refuse a claim in year three?

Not on its own. A guarantee is an extra promise on top of the law, and under section 45 it cannot exclude or limit statutory rights. Claims made after the guarantee lapses are judged on whether the goods conformed to the contract when they were delivered, not on whether the warranty card has run out.

Where does the guarantee statement have to be given to the customer?

On a durable medium, no later than delivery, under section 44(1). A printed insert, a PDF attached to the order confirmation or an emailed statement all work. Wording that exists only on a product page the customer has no reason to revisit is a weaker position, because you may need to show later what terms were actually given.

What if a customer sells the item on while the guarantee is still running?

The guarantee goes with the goods. Section 42 lets the new owner rely on it during the remaining period against the guarantor, or against you under section 41, as if they had been the original buyer. The same applies under section 46 to anybody who receives the goods as a gift.

Sources