Still waiting for your online order to arrive? You’re not the only one

More people are lodging complaints about missing online shopping orders, as consumer advocates say shoppers need to be better protected from no-show purchases.

The NSW Office of Fair Trading received 6103 complaints about delayed or missing retail orders last year, an increase from 4380 in 2022, and 3780 the previous year.

Fair Trading recently ordered sports apparel company Beastwear, which has since been deregistered, to pay more than $47,000 in compensation to seven community sports clubs and cultural groups, after they ordered football kits and training uniforms that did not arrive.

The timely delivery of online goods is a pain point for many consumers.Credit: Getty

Beastwear’s controlling manager Aden Rashid Nawaz Bhatt, also known as Aden Nawaz, was also personally fined $45,000 during sentencing in Parramatta Local Court in April, for knowingly breaching consumer law.

Under the Australian consumer guarantees, products and services bought in Australia must be delivered within the time specified by the seller, or a reasonable time if a delivery time is not specified.

Many of the community groups that did not receive orders from Beastwear had conducted fundraisers to pay for the uniforms, which were then only delivered in part or never arrived.

Myles Garner, president of Ormeau AFL Club in Queensland, said his club had spent more than $17,000 on uniforms well ahead of the start of their 2020 season. They received about 300 of the 1000 items ordered.

“The order never showed up, and then we were without,” he said.

“As a small club, we took a massive hit financially. Luckily, some other places stepped in to help us out. But that took time.”

Beastwear did not respond to requests for comment.

Consumer rights when online shopping is a growing concern for the nation’s regulators, with several experts calling for protections to be strengthened.

The 2023 Australian Consumer Law survey found that 55 per cent of problematic transactions were now associated with ecommerce.

In a speech to the Committee for Economic Development in March, ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said delivery timeframes had emerged as a key issue for the regulator, with it and other bodies that receive complaints seeing an uptick.

“There is a concern that misleading conduct by retailers about delivery timeframes can not only impact consumers decisions, but it will also have an impact on those businesses that are accurately representing the true delivery timeframes,” she said.

Cass-Gottlieb said she would support strengthening of the consumer guarantees so that failure to honour the guarantees is a contravention of the Australian Consumer Law incurring more significant penalties, rather than merely a remedy (such as a refund, compensation or contract cancellation for the consumer).

Chandni Gupta, deputy CEO and digital policy director at the Consumer Policy Research Centre, agreed reform was needed, with the current regulations only enforced following consumer complaints.

“It’s on the consumer to action their consumer rights,” she said.

“That means there’s a real power imbalance between you as an individual and the business when you are trying to say, ‘Actually, I haven’t received this. Or it is taking a lot longer than I expected.’”

While businesses failing to meet a given delivery timeframe could be found to have committed misleading and deceptive conduct, Gupta said Australia should consider a prohibition on unfair trading practices, as exists in the EU and US.

“At the moment, unfair isn’t actually illegal,” she said.

University of Sydney business law academic Professor Andrew Terry said he expected Australia would soon seek to prohibit unfair trading.

“It would be a measure to capture those practices that are not misleading or unconscionable but are unfair,” he said.

However, Terry said that the current consumer protections for long delivery times – found in section 36 of the Australian Consumer Law – appeared to be sufficient, pointing to the ACCC’s Federal Court action against Mosaic, which owns several fashion brands including Katies, Noni B and Rivers, in March.

The ACCC alleges customers had received delivery timeframes of two to 17 business days when shopping online in late 2021 and early 2022, but one in four orders were not being dispatched from Mosaic’s warehouses until at least 20 days after they were received.

The budget fashion retailer has said it will be vigorously defending the matter in court.

For Dr Katharine Kemp, an associate professor in law and justice at UNSW, the issue with the current regulatory framework is that the ACCC can’t ask for penalties against businesses that continually fail to meet the consumer guarantees.

“It would really help to change the law so that the ACCC can seek large fines against the companies who keep ignoring the consumer guarantees,” she said.

“Businesses are more likely to pay attention if they know they could be facing millions of dollars in penalties, rather than just having to give consumers a refund.”

NSW Fair Trading Commissioner Natasha Mann said its prosecution of Beastwear showed it was committed to enforcing consumer protections for online orders.