Victorian tribunal awards $180 refund for mixer that stopped working after purchase

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal ordered Owen Bell to pay Leah Nguyen AUD 180 in exchange for her returning a mixer that stopped working shortly after she bought it. Nguyen had sought the purchase price back rather than an order requiring Bell to repair the appliance.

The dispute turned on whether Bell’s offer to repair the mixer, and Nguyen’s question about how long that would take, made a refund inappropriate. The tribunal found that she had not accepted the repair.

The tribunal found that Nguyen bought the mixer for AUD 180 and that it failed about three weeks later. Although the receipt and dated video described in submissions were not available for the tribunal to inspect, Bell expressly accepted that they supported the purchase and early failure.

The cause of the failure remained unknown. The tribunal said that uncertainty was not evidence that Nguyen’s account was wrong, and the supplied rules did not require her to prove a particular mechanical cause before the failure could support a remedy.

A seller’s fair chance to fix a problem could matter, the tribunal said, but a repair offer was not an automatic bar to a refund. There was no evidence that Nguyen accepted the offer, that a repair was attempted or that one would have succeeded.

Returning the mixer in exchange for its purchase price was proportionate to the proven harm, the tribunal concluded. It awarded no additional monetary relief.

Nguyen said she asked about repair timing to compare her options, not to give up her request for a refund. She also argued that Bell had not given her a clear repair timeframe or assurance that a repair would work.

Bell accepted that the full message exchange ended with Nguyen still seeking a refund. He acknowledged that his screenshot, which showed her asking about repair time, omitted a later message and did not prove she had agreed to repair.

He nevertheless asked the tribunal to consider his offer and the uncertainty about the fault. He said he had not inspected the mixer and could not say what caused the failure or whether repair would have worked.

Nguyen bought the mixer from Bell’s Melbourne shop and sought a refund after it stopped turning on. The case record contains differing accounts of the timing; the tribunal’s finding was that the failure occurred about three weeks after purchase.

The order resolves the refund claim on the evidence available. It does not determine the precise cause of the failure or whether the mixer could have been repaired.