What the law guarantees you, and who owes it.

The four service guarantees

The Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 gives a consumer four guarantees whenever services are supplied in trade. They apply automatically. Nobody has to ask for them and no contract can remove them from a consumer.

• Reasonable care and skill: The service must be carried out with the care and skill of a competent person doing that kind of work. This is the guarantee behind most complaints about workmanship: not perfection, but competence.

• Fit for the purpose you made known: If you told the supplier what result you needed, or the purpose is obvious from the job itself, the service and anything produced by it must be reasonably fit for that purpose and reasonably capable of achieving that result.

• Completed in a reasonable time: Where you have not agreed a completion date, the work must be finished within a reasonable time. What is reasonable depends on the job, not on how busy the supplier is.

• A reasonable price: Where a price was not fixed or agreed in advance, you only have to pay a reasonable price for the work actually done.

Agreeing a written scope, a fixed price and a date up front does not weaken these guarantees. It removes the argument about what was agreed, which is why the platform records all three against the job.

What you can ask for when a guarantee is not met

The remedy depends on whether the failure can be put right, and how serious it is.

• A failure that can be fixed: You can require the supplier to remedy it within a reasonable time. If they refuse, or do not do it in a reasonable time, you can have it put right elsewhere and recover the reasonable cost, or cancel and stop paying for the part not performed.

• A substantial failure: Where the failure is substantial, you can cancel the contract outright, or keep the work and claim compensation for the reduction in its value.

• Consequential loss: You can also claim for reasonably foreseeable loss or damage caused by the failure, beyond the value of the work itself.

• Give them the chance first: In most cases the fastest route is telling the provider what is wrong, in writing, and giving them a reasonable opportunity to fix it. The dispute process is built to hold that conversation with evidence attached.

How this works on a marketplace

This is the part most marketplaces are vague about. Serproz is not going to be.

• The provider supplies the work: The provider who carries out your job supplies those services in trade, so the four guarantees above are owed to you by that provider. Booking through Serproz does not move that obligation onto Serproz.

• Serproz supplies the platform: Serproz supplies the marketplace service — matching, records, the payment and milestone mechanics, the labels on a profile. The guarantees apply to that service in its own right, and a failure of it is Serproz's responsibility.

• So which is it?: A tap still leaking is a question for the provider. A milestone released when it should not have been, a verification label that was wrong, a fee charged that should not have been — those are questions for Serproz.

• Both can be true at once: Nothing stops you from pursuing the provider over the work and Serproz over how the platform handled it. They are separate claims against separate suppliers.

Serproz does not carry out, supervise or warrant the work, and does not employ the providers who do. That is stated in the terms of use and repeated here so it cannot be a surprise later.

When the guarantees do not apply

Being clear about the edges is part of being honest about the middle.

• Business purchases: The Act protects consumers. Where services are supplied and acquired in trade for the purposes of a business, the parties can agree in writing that the guarantees do not apply, and that agreement is effective where the Act allows it and it is fair and reasonable. A Pro plan is a business purchase in this sense.

• Supply outside trade: The guarantees attach to a supply made in trade. Work arranged privately, outside a trading supply, is a matter of ordinary contract law instead.

• You changed your mind: The Act is not a cooling-off period. There is no statutory right to cancel competent work simply because you no longer want it. Contractual cancellation is covered separately.

• You caused the problem: A failure caused by something you did, by the state of the site, or by an instruction you insisted on against advice, is not a breach of the guarantees.

• Off-platform arrangements: Your statutory rights against the provider still exist. What does not exist is the platform's evidence trail, held funds and dispute process, because none of that was used.

The Fair Trading Act 1986

The Consumer Guarantees Act is about what you got. The Fair Trading Act is about what you were told.

• No misleading or deceptive conduct: Nobody acting in trade may mislead or deceive you, whether by what they say, what they imply, or what they leave out. That applies to a provider describing their business and to Serproz describing its own.

• No false representations: False or misleading claims about qualifications, licensing, approval, price, or the standard of a service are prohibited. This is why Serproz labels a check with the exact register and scope it covers, and calls an unclaimed listing unclaimed.

• No unsubstantiated claims: A representation made in trade must have reasonable grounds behind it at the time it is made. A claim that cannot be evidenced should not appear at all — which is why some parts of this site show an empty state rather than a number.

• Unfair terms in standard-form contracts: A term in a standard-form consumer contract that creates a significant imbalance, is not reasonably necessary to protect a legitimate interest and would cause detriment can be declared unfair by a court on the Commerce Commission's application. The Serproz terms are a standard-form contract and are written with that test in mind.

• You cannot be contracted out of it: In a consumer transaction the Fair Trading Act cannot be contracted out of. In a trade-to-trade transaction it can be, in limited respects and only where doing so is fair and reasonable.

Other law that may apply to your job

• Building work: The Building Act 2004 implies warranties into residential building contracts and restricts who may carry out or supervise restricted building work. A licence label on a profile is not a substitute for confirming that the person doing the work holds the right class of licence for it.

• Construction contracts: The Construction Contracts Act 2002 gives payment and adjudication rights on construction contracts, including residential work. Adjudication is available regardless of anything in the Serproz terms.

• Regulated trades: Electrical, gas and plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying work is subject to its own registration and certification regime. Ask for the certificate the work requires and keep it.

• Health and safety: A provider has duties under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, and as the person who controls the site you may have duties too. Neither can be contracted away.

Where to go outside Serproz

You never need Serproz's permission to escalate, and using the platform's process first does not use up any of these.

• Disputes Tribunal: A low-cost, lawyer-free forum for civil claims up to its current monetary limit. It can hear a claim against a provider over the work, or against Serproz over the platform service.

• Commerce Commission: Enforces the Fair Trading Act. It takes reports about misleading conduct in trade, although it does not resolve individual claims for compensation.

• Consumer Protection: The government's consumer information service publishes plain-language guidance on the Consumer Guarantees Act and on resolving a problem with a trader.

• Occupational regulators: Complaints about the conduct or competence of a licensed practitioner go to the board or authority that licenses that occupation.

• Privacy Commissioner: Complaints about how personal information was handled go to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, which is independent.

Government guidance is published at consumerprotection.govt.nz, the Commerce Commission at comcom.govt.nz, and the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

How to use these rights on a Serproz job

• Put the problem in writing on the job, not in a text message. The scope, change orders, photos and messages recorded there are what makes a claim provable later.

• Say which guarantee you say was not met, and what outcome you want — remedy, redo, refund, or a reduction.

• Open a dispute on the milestone if the conversation stalls. That freezes the money for that milestone while it is decided.

• If the outcome is still wrong, take it to one of the routes above. Nothing in the Serproz process is a condition of doing so.

Start a job problem at dispute resolution. Start a problem with Serproz itself at complaints.