Returning a gift

A gift that does not fit, is a duplicate or is simply wrong is one of the few purchases where the buyer and the user are not the same person. The law sees that difference, and almost everything that goes wrong afterwards follows from it.

Start with the core of it: the right to withdraw belongs to whoever entered into the contract. Fourteen days, no reason required, for the consumer who ordered and paid. The person who received the parcel is not a party to that purchase. This is not shop policy but the shape of the law, and two practical things follow. The giver has to make the request. And the money goes back to the payment method it came from, which is the giver's.

The same line runs through the legal guarantee. If it does not work as you were entitled to expect, that is a claim by the buyer against the seller - see your rights when you buy online for what you can actually demand. The recipient who contacts the shop directly is formally empty handed, even though they are the one with the faulty device in the house.

Then there is everything shops offer voluntarily, which is usually what actually resolves a gift. An extended return window over the holidays, a credit note instead of money, an exchange without the till receipt, a return label in the recipient's name: none of that is in the law. They are contractual promises, and a promise is worth exactly what the terms say. Large retailers such as Amazon publish their window somewhere on the site; smaller shops often publish it nowhere, and then it is not a right but a favour that varies by whoever answers.

Three things that save it in practice. Keep the packaging until the window has passed, because an item whose seal you have broken - software, a game, music - falls outside the withdrawal right regardless. Check the window before the holidays rather than after, since an extended window is written to be read before the purchase. And buy from a marketplace deliberately, because your claim runs against the seller behind the listing and not against the platform; see who actually sells this.

And then the awkward part. Exercising the withdrawal right means the giver finds out: they make the request and they receive the money. Anyone who wants to avoid that ends up at an exchange or a credit note in the shop itself, which is precisely the route that is not in the law. That is the real reason to know what a shop does on top of it. Not because it is more, but because it is the only route that does not run through the giver.