Buying Flooring Online: Your Rights

Section 230 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 makes the total price of a product material information that has to be given in an invitation to purchase, and it defines the total price as including any fees, taxes, charges or other payments the consumer will necessarily incur. Where part of the price cannot reasonably be calculated in advance, the seller must say how it will be calculated. For flooring the payment most often left to the last screen is delivery, and the Act is the reason it belongs in the total before the last screen. A price per square metre with the delivery to be revealed at checkout is the pattern the section was written against.

Schedule 20 to the same Act lists commercial practices that are unfair in all circumstances, and paragraph 13 covers reviews. Submitting or commissioning fake reviews, or reviews that conceal an incentive, is one. Publishing consumer reviews or review information in a misleading way is another. And publishing reviews without taking such reasonable and proportionate steps as are necessary to prevent fake, concealed-incentivised or false or misleading reviews from being published, and to remove them, is a third. Enforcement is a duty of every local weights and measures authority in Great Britain, that is Trading Standards, and the Competition and Markets Authority may also enforce it. A review count is not evidence of anything; the duty to keep the reviews honest sits with whoever publishes them.

For goods bought at a distance, regulation 30 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 gives a cancellation period that ends 14 days after the day the goods come into the physical possession of the consumer, or of a person other than the carrier whom the consumer identified to take them. Where several goods ordered together are delivered on different days, the 14 days run from the day the last of them arrives. The period is about the decision to keep the goods; it is not conditional on anything being wrong with them.

The exception that matters for flooring is regulation 28. It disapplies the right to cancel for goods made to the consumer's specifications or clearly personalised, and cut-to-size or made-to-measure flooring falls within that. A boxed board taken from stock is not made to your specification; a run cut to your drawing is. The seller's returns page sets out the practicalities of a return, who arranges the carriage and where the boxes go back to; the regulations set the period and the exception.

Section 9 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 treats every consumer contract to supply goods as including a term that their quality is satisfactory, measured against what a reasonable person would consider satisfactory taking account of the description, the price and all the other relevant circumstances. The section names the aspects of quality: fitness for all the purposes for which goods of that kind are usually supplied, appearance and finish, freedom from minor defects, safety and durability.

The word to hold on to in that list is "description", because in flooring the description does a great deal of work. A board sold as rustic grade is described as having knots, colour variation and filled features, and a board with those things conforms to its description; a board sold as classic grade is described with fewer of them. The declared use class, the wear layer and the warranty are description too, and they are the yardsticks a board is measured against, which is why this range publishes them on every product page.

Where goods do not conform, the Act gives a sequence of remedies: a short-term right to reject, a right to repair or replacement, and then a right to a price reduction or a final right to reject. Section 22 sets the time limit for the short-term right to reject at 30 days, beginning with the day after ownership has been transferred, the goods have been delivered and, where the contract requires the trader to install them, the trader has told you that has been done.

The practical consequence for flooring is to inspect on arrival. Open the boxes, check the decor and the batch against the order, look at the boards before they are fitted, and raise anything then. The 30 days run from delivery, and a fault found on a board is a different conversation from a fault found in a floor.

The floors in this range carry manufacturers' warranties: 20 years on the solid oak, 25 on the rigid vinyl and the laminate, 15 or 20 on the engineered oak and parquet, and a lifetime warranty on the wall panels. Section 30 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires a guarantee on goods to state that the consumer has statutory rights in relation to them and that those rights are not affected by the guarantee. The warranty therefore adds to the rights above; it does not replace them, and it cannot shorten them. What a warranty covers, and the fitting and cleaning conditions it attaches, are in its own terms.

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The product pages carry the measured attributes each board is described by, and the glossary explains the terms. The calculator is there so that the order is right the first time, which is a smaller matter than any of the above and prevents most of it. The wear layer guide and the choosing guide cover what the description on a product page means.

GlossaryFlooring Glossary

CalculatorFlooring Calculator: How Much to Order

Room guideBest Flooring for Rental Properties

How to chooseEngineered Wood Wear Layer: 3 mm, 4 mm or 6 mm

Delivery is part of the total price, and what it costs depends on where the order is going. Browse by town and region.

DeliveryWhere we deliver