Start a conversation

EU compliance

The European legal guarantee: who carries it, and for how long

In Europe a consumer who finds a defect has a claim against the seller, not against the factory. A manufacturer selling directly to European consumers is that seller, for a period the law fixes and a contract cannot shorten.

China → France

Selling to an importer put a professional between you and the end customer, and that professional absorbed the complaints. Selling directly to a European consumer removes it. The order arrives in your own name, the money arrives in your own account, and so does the obligation that European law attaches to the seller — an obligation most exporters discover the week a customer writes to say the product stopped working.

Legal guarantee or commercial warranty: which one is the customer invoking?

These are separate objects and almost every dispute begins by confusing them. The legal guarantee is imposed by law on the seller, costs the consumer nothing, lasts for a period the legislation sets, and cannot be reduced, excluded or made conditional by your terms. The commercial warranty is something you offer voluntarily: you write it, you price it, you decide its scope. Answering a legal claim with the limits of your commercial warranty — expired, registration required, carriage not covered — is the most common mistake, and it is read by a European consumer, and by a consumer authority, as a refusal to honour the law.

  • Who writes it. The legal guarantee is written by the legislator and applies whether or not your terms mention it. The commercial warranty is written by you, and only binds you to what it says.
  • What it costs the consumer. Nothing: bringing the product back into conformity under the legal guarantee must be free for the buyer, carriage and labour included. A commercial warranty may be sold, and often is.
  • What may be excluded. From the legal guarantee, nothing that the law does not already exclude — a clause reducing it is simply unenforceable. From the commercial warranty, whatever you wrote, provided the document says so clearly.
  • What the written document has to state. A commercial warranty must be given in plain terms and must say that it is additional to the legal guarantee, which continues to apply. Presenting a paid warranty as the consumer's only recourse is an infringement in itself.
  • Who answers. The legal claim goes to the seller. A commercial warranty may be carried by the manufacturer, which is why a consumer can sometimes choose — and why your support team must know which door the customer knocked on.

What the consumer can ask for, and in which order

The remedies are not a menu from which the seller picks the cheapest. The law organises them in stages. First, bringing the product back into conformity: repair or replacement, with the consumer choosing between them unless the one chosen is impossible or imposes costs that are plainly disproportionate compared with the other. Only when that stage fails does the second open: a reduction of the price, or termination of the contract with a refund. A seller who offers a partial refund straight away to avoid a repair is skipping a stage that belongs to the consumer, not to him.

  1. The consumer reports the defect and asks for repair or replacement. Nothing obliges him to prove how the defect arose.
  2. You bring the product into conformity, free of charge and within a reasonable time, carriage and labour included. Reasonable is assessed against the product and its use, not against your logistics.
  3. If the repair fails, is refused, is not done in time, or the defect comes back, the consumer moves to the next stage without having to start over.
  4. He then asks for a price reduction and keeps the product, or terminates the contract and returns it against a refund. For a defect of minor importance, termination may be out of reach; the reduction is not.
  5. You keep the trace: what was reported, what was offered, what was done, on which dates. A dispute is decided on that trace, and it is the part a seller operating from abroad most often fails to produce.

Why the burden of proof is against you at the beginning

Here is the rule that changes the economics of direct selling. For an initial period after delivery, a defect that appears is presumed to have existed at the moment the goods were handed over. The consumer proves nothing; you have to prove the contrary if you want to refuse. After that period the presumption reverses and the burden moves to the consumer, which is far harder for him and explains why most disputes arrive early. The length of that initial period, and of the guarantee itself, is set by the national transposition and is not the same everywhere — it is the first thing to check for each country you sell into, rather than assume from a neighbouring market.

Operationally, the presumption means your evidence has to be built before the claim, not after. Production records that tie a serial number to a batch, a dated functional test before dispatch, photographs of the packed item, and the ability to say which component came from which supplier: that is what lets you refuse a claim for misuse with something other than an assertion. Without it, every early claim is a claim you will pay, and the refusals you issue anyway will come back as chargebacks, platform complaints and negative public reviews.

So the consumer sues you, and not the factory?

Yes — and when you are both, the point is easy to miss. The consumer's claim under the legal guarantee is contractual: it runs against the party that sold him the product. If your European entity sells, it carries the claim. If you sell from China as a trader on a marketplace, you are the seller and you carry it there too. Whether you can then recover from your own supplier, your subcontractor or the maker of the faulty component is a separate contract, governed by separate law, and the consumer is not asked to wait for it. That recourse is worth negotiating precisely because it is the only thing standing between the guarantee and your own margin. What follows from that, for a direct-to-consumer model, is a set of budget lines rather than legal subtleties. You need somewhere in Europe for the product to come back to, because a guarantee honoured by return carriage to Asia is a guarantee nobody uses and everybody complains about. And you need spare parts and replacement units held on the continent, because the stage the law makes you offer first is repair or replacement — not a refund, however much simpler a refund feels from a distance.

Write the guarantee clause of your terms before the first sale, in the language of each country you sell into, and write it as the law reads it: the legal guarantee stated plainly, your commercial warranty presented as an addition and never as a substitute. Then give your support team a short script — which guarantee is being invoked, what stage the consumer is at, what you may ask him to prove and what you may not. Most of what this obligation costs is spent answering badly, not repairing.

Where to read it yourself

Official pages, opened and checked on 15 October 2026. Where a rule changes, these are the addresses that change with it — this article does not.

Questions we get on this.

Can we limit the legal guarantee in our terms and conditions?

No. The legal guarantee is imposed on the seller and a clause that shortens it, excludes a remedy, charges for carriage or makes the claim conditional on registration is unenforceable against the consumer — and the clause itself can be treated as an unfair term and sanctioned, separately from the claim it was meant to block. What you may do is go beyond it: a commercial warranty that lasts longer, covers more, or offers an easier procedure is entirely yours to design, provided the document says clearly that the legal guarantee applies in addition.

Do we have to accept a claim when the customer broke the product?

The legal guarantee covers a lack of conformity that existed when the product was handed over, not damage caused afterwards by misuse, an accident or normal wear. The difficulty is procedural rather than legal: during the initial period after delivery the defect is presumed to have been there, so it is you who must show it was not. That is why dispatch tests, batch records and photographs matter. A refusal supported by a dated test and an examination of the returned item usually holds; a refusal that rests only on your opinion of how the product looks does not.

Our supplier's warranty is shorter than the European guarantee. Is that a problem?

It is a cost, and it is yours. The consumer's claim is against the seller for the whole period the law sets, whatever your own supply contract says, so the gap is absorbed by your margin unless you negotiate it. The usual ways to close it are to extend the recourse in the purchase contract with your supplier, to hold a stock of spare parts and replacement units bought at production price while the line is still running, and to price the residual risk into the product. Doing none of them works until the first bad batch, which is also when a shorter supplier warranty is hardest to renegotiate.

Keep reading on this.

France / EuropeAfter-sales: the objection European buyers rarely say out loudThe buyer is not worried about your product. They are worried about what happens in month fourteen when something fails and you are eight thousand kilometres away.EU complianceWhen the manufacturer is outside Europe, who pays for a defective product?European law answers this with a chain of substitutes, and the first link is your importer. Understanding the order explains why European buyers negotiate indemnities so hard.EU complianceThe right of withdrawal, and what happens to the goods that come backA European consumer buying at distance may change his mind without giving a reason, within a period the law sets. The right is simple to state and expensive to organise when the stock ships from China.

If this raised a question about your own project, tell us where you are — the first conversation usually clarifies more than a proposal.

Talk about selling into Europe →Read the full guide