If you sell into Australia, the refund policy Shopify writes for you is a liability, not a shortcut. Since Shopify started auto-generating and auto-updating store policy pages in October 2026, a lot of Australian stores now have a legal-looking refund page they never read, built on American defaults: a 30-day window, final-sale exclusions, restocking fees, and language that quietly implies your obligations end when the window closes. Under Australian Consumer Law they don't. Consumer guarantees sit outside any return window you publish, can't be contracted away, and apply to a $40 bath bomb and a $4,000 e-bike alike. So the job isn't to delete the generated text. It's to split it in two: what you owe by law, and what you choose to offer on top.
Below is what we change, line by line, when we set up or audit a store for the Australian market. Not legal advice, and a solicitor should see the final wording if you're selling anything with real injury or warranty exposure. But most of this is correctable in an afternoon.
Where the default Shopify refund policy fails Australian law
Five phrases do most of the damage. Search your generated text for them.
- "Items must be returned within 30 days" β fine as a change-of-mind rule, unlawful if it reads as the outer limit on faults. A pair of boots that delaminates in month five is still your problem.
- "Sale items are final sale" / "no refunds on discounted goods" β consumer guarantees apply to discounted stock. The only safe exclusion is a fault you disclosed and discounted for, described specifically.
- "A 15% restocking fee applies" β charge that on a faulty return and you're deducting money from a remedy the law says is the customer's.
- "Customer is responsible for return shipping" β true for change of mind, false for faults. If the goods fail a guarantee, you bear the cost of getting them back, and for anything bulky you're expected to arrange collection rather than make the customer freight a treadmill from Geraldton.
- "We are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss" β a blanket exclusion that bumps straight into the guarantee regime, and in a standard-form contract it's exposed to the unfair contract terms rules as well.
The generated shipping and terms pages have their own problems, which I'll get to. The refund page is the one that gets stores into trouble because it's linked at checkout and the ACCC treats published policies as representations to consumers.
Consumer guarantees versus voluntary returns: two policies, one page
Nearly every bad Australian refund page is bad for the same reason. It blends a goodwill returns offer with legal obligations until a customer can't tell which is which, and the legal obligations lose.
Write them as separate sections with separate headings.
Section one: your rights under the Australian Consumer Law. Goods must be of acceptable quality, match their description, be fit for the purpose you were told about, and match any sample or demo. These guarantees come from the law, not from us, and they can't be excluded. They have no expiry date set by a policy β how long they last depends on what a reasonable person would expect from that product at that price.
Section two: our change-of-mind returns. Here you can set almost any rule you like, provided you honour it. Thirty days, unworn, tags on, original packaging, customer pays return postage, store credit rather than cash. All legitimate. The ACL does not require you to take back a jumper because the colour looked different on a phone screen. The only trap is promising something in an ad or a product page that your policy then takes back.
Australian shoppers have gotten used to generous returns from the big marketplaces, so there's commercial pressure to go further than the law. Worth doing the sum before you do. Take 1,000 orders a month at an AOV of $118. A 7% change-of-mind return rate is 70 returns, $8,260 of revenue reversed. Cover return postage at a flat $9.20 through a returns portal and that's another $644 a month, call it $7,700 a year, before anyone picks, inspects and restocks. On a small population where you can't just buy more traffic to cover it, free change-of-mind returns has to earn its place as a retention spend, not get switched on because a competitor did it.
And remember the GST adjustment. Refund that $118 in full and the GST component you back out is $118 Γ· 11 = $10.73. Shopify will handle the order-level maths; your bookkeeper still needs the adjustment note trail at BAS time, especially if you're issuing partial refunds as a goodwill gesture rather than a full reversal.
Remedy wording: who gets to choose
This is the paragraph the templates never get right, and it's the one that decides whether a dispute ends in an email or at a state fair trading body.
For a major failure β the product is unsafe, significantly different from what was described, unfit for its purpose and can't easily be fixed, or a reasonable consumer wouldn't have bought it had they known β the customer chooses. Refund, or replacement. Your preference doesn't come into it, and you can't insist on repairing first.
For a minor failure, you choose, and you can choose repair, as long as you do it in a reasonable time. If you don't, the customer can have it fixed elsewhere and recover the cost, or reject the goods.
Either way the customer may also be able to claim reasonably foreseeable loss caused by the failure. So the wording to put on the page is plainly: for a major problem you can choose a refund or a replacement; for a minor problem we'll repair it within a reasonable period. Don't write "at our discretion" anywhere near it.
If you also offer your own warranty β "12-month warranty on all frames" β the Competition and Consumer Regulations prescribe a specific statement that has to accompany it, opening with the point that your goods come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. The exact text is set out in the regulations and the ACCC publishes it. Copy it from the source, include your business name, address, phone and email, and don't paraphrase it to fit your brand voice. It's one of the few places in your store where the wording isn't yours.
Shipping policy wording that survives WA, regional, and a summer Christmas
The generated shipping page tends to say something like "orders ship in 1β2 business days, delivery 3β5 business days". Publish that nationally and you've made a representation you can't keep. Australia Post's own parcel timeframes stretch well past five days once you're off the east coast, and a Sendle satchel going from a Melbourne 3PL to a Pilbara postcode is a different animal from one going to Carlton.
What we write instead:
- Dispatch time and delivery time stated separately, because customers conflate them and then complain about the wrong thing.
- Delivery estimates banded by destination β metro, regional, WA and NT, Tasmania β with the honest upper bound, not the carrier's happy path.
- Explicit language that estimates are estimates and carrier delays sit outside your control, paired with what you will actually do if a parcel goes missing: investigate with the carrier, and resend or refund. The services guarantee under the ACL requires supply within a reasonable time, and if you've taken money and can't deliver, a refund is the answer. A disclaimer doesn't get you out of that.
- Remote and bulky surcharges disclosed up front, with the total at checkout GST-inclusive. Component pricing rules mean the headline price a consumer sees needs to be the single total they can actually pay. Drip-fed surcharges at step three of checkout are both an ACCC problem and an abandonment problem.
- Christmas cut-off dates published by state, updated every November. A summer peak that lands in the same fortnight as staff annual leave and carrier volume caps is the single most common source of refund disputes we see in Australian stores, and the fix is a date on a page, not an apology in a support ticket.
If you ship inbound from overseas suppliers, say something about duties and the low-value imported goods rules too. Goods valued at A$1,000 or less have GST collected at the point of sale by the supplier or platform; above that, GST and duty are collected at the border and your customer gets a bill they weren't expecting. Whoever eats that cost should be named in writing.
Afterpay and Zip refunds need their own line
BNPL is close to table stakes here, and the refund mechanics confuse people. When you refund an Afterpay or Zip order, the money goes back through the provider, not to the customer's card, and the customer's instalment schedule keeps running until the provider processes the adjustment. That lag generates support tickets and the occasional chargeback attempt.
Two sentences on the refund page solve it: refunds on BNPL orders are returned to the provider and applied to your payment plan, and any instalments already debited are credited back by them, which can take a few business days after we process the return. Say it plainly and your support volume drops.
Sustainability claims the ACCC would read as greenwashing
Australian buyers respond to provenance and environmental claims more than most markets, which is exactly why enforcement here is active. The ACCC has published guidance for businesses making environmental claims and has taken action against companies over vague or unsubstantiated ones. Your policy pages are often where the sloppiest version of those claims lives, because nobody treats them as marketing copy.
Things we flag and rewrite:
- "Eco-friendly", "sustainable", "green", "planet-positive" with nothing behind them. Either name the attribute β "our mailers are made from 80% post-consumer recycled LDPE" β or cut the word.
- "Carbon neutral" or "net zero" where the basis is offsets. Say what's offset, by whom, under which standard, and whether it covers the product or only the delivery leg. An unqualified claim covering the whole business when you've only offset shipping is the textbook problem.
- "100% recyclable" for packaging that isn't accepted in kerbside recycling across the country. Soft plastics in particular. Qualify it with where and how.
- "Plastic-free" on a parcel with a plastic tape seal or a poly sticker. Someone will photograph it.
- "Australian Made" and "Made in Australia" when the goods are imported and only packed or assembled locally. Country-of-origin claims have their own tests under the ACL, and "Australian owned" is a different claim from "Australian made". Pick the one that's true.
- Future commitments stated as present fact. "We are plastic free by 2027" reads as achieved to a skim-reading consumer. Write it as a target with a date and a measurement.
The practical test we use: could you hand a regulator a document that substantiates this sentence, today, without a meeting? If not, soften it or delete it. If you need the claims rebuilt across product pages and collections as well as the policy pages, that's a content job rather than a legal one, but do them together or the inconsistency becomes the evidence.
Terms of service, unfair contract terms, and governing law
The generated terms page is generic international boilerplate. Three things need attention for an Australian store.
First, governing law and jurisdiction should name your state, not Delaware or Ontario. Second, the liability clause has to carve out the consumer guarantees explicitly β the standard formula limits your liability to the extent permitted by law and makes clear that nothing in the terms excludes rights under the ACL. Third, read the whole thing against the unfair contract terms regime, which since the November 2023 amendments carries real penalties for including an unfair term in a standard form consumer or small business contract, whether or not you ever enforce it. The usual offenders are unilateral variation clauses, automatic renewal terms on subscriptions, and clauses letting you cancel an order after payment for any reason without a refund. Subscription stores should look hardest at this.
Do you need a separate refund policy page at all?
Yes, and keep it separate from terms of service. Shopify publishes each policy at its own URL under /policies/, links them in the footer, and surfaces the refund and privacy policies at checkout. Burying refund terms inside a 3,000-word terms document means the customer never sees them before paying, which weakens them as contract terms and annoys everyone. Separate pages also let you link the right one from the right place: refunds from the product page FAQ, shipping from the cart.
One refinement worth making. The policy pages render inside a stripped-back template with no sections, so you can't add an accordion, a returns-portal button or a contact block. We often publish a full returns page as a normal page β with the form, the carrier instructions, the state-by-state cut-offs β and keep the /policies/ version as the clean legal text that links across to it. Both exist, both say the same thing, neither tries to do the other's job.
Editing the templates without losing your edits
Policies live in Settings β Policies. The generator inserts a draft; once you overwrite it, your version is what publishes. The risk with auto-updating templates is that a platform-side refresh reintroduces default wording into a page nobody's looked at since launch, so treat it the way you'd treat a theme update.
- Keep the approved text in a document outside Shopify, with a version date and the name of whoever signed it off.
- Put a quarterly reminder on someone's calendar to open all four policy pages and read them end to end. Fifteen minutes.
- Re-check after any store setup change that touches policies β a new market, a new currency, a new subscription app.
- If you run multiple Shopify Markets for Australia and New Zealand, confirm which policy text each market serves. Consumer law differs, and one page claiming to cover both usually covers neither properly.
Nothing here needs a developer, with one exception: if you want the returns portal, cut-off table or warranty statement rendered consistently across templates, that's theme work. We do it as part of a build, and it's also the kind of small scoped task a Shopify developer on a short engagement can knock over in a day.
A 20-minute pass you can do today
Open your refund policy and search for "final sale", "restocking", "30 days", "not responsible" and "at our discretion". Then open your shipping policy and check whether the delivery estimate you've published is one you'd defend for a Broome address in the week before Christmas. Then search your whole site for "eco", "sustainable" and "carbon" and ask whether each hit is substantiated.
If that turns up more than you want to fix on your own, our team handles policy, checkout and content reviews as part of a store audit, and the Australian market work we do is mostly this sort of unglamorous correction rather than a redesign.