Sale of refurbished laptop lands Amazon in soup

Chandigarh, December 14

The District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum, Chandigarh, has ordered Bengaluru-based company Amazon India—Bridge Gateway to pay around Rs 1 lakh to a Chandigarh-based resident for the sale of a refurbished laptop.

The online platform has been asked to pay Rs 69, 990, at an annual interest of 9 per cent, along with Rs 10,000 litigation in expenses and a compensation of Rs 20,000 for the unfair trade practice and harassment to Ravinder Singh, a resident of Sector 43-B. Singh had ordered a Dell laptop for Rs 69,990 in May, 2016. Cglobal, Mumbai, delivered it to Singh.

He claimed that the laptop did not function properly and within three months, the operating software had to be reinstalled, hard disk replacement was required and motherboard was tried to be fixed.

In a span of one year, it remained with the service centre for most of the time. When he approached Dell, he was told that the system was a refurbished one.

Dell told the consumer forum that the laptop was originally sold in the USA in February 2016 to Costco and the same was returned to Dell and resold to Cachet Works USA LLC in March 2016 as a refurbished system. The system was imported to India via a parallel xhannel. The one-year warranty on laptop expired in March 2017.

The court observed, “...the opposite party (Amazon) is solely liable if the product sold by a third party seller on its platform turned to be fake/imitated/refurbished. At any rate, Amazon’s measures for countering fakes seems to be weak due to its lax policies, which promoted selling of fake products, as sellers could remain anonymous and know that they would face no legal recourse.” — TNS