Terms of Sale
What a Lifeline Collars pre-order covers.
This is the terms-of-sale page for the Lifeline Collars website. It is written in plain English from the Perth workshop, on the same five topics that visitors and stockists ask most often — what a pre-order is, how cancellation and refunds work, the Australian delivery window for the first batch, the hardware warranty, and a short note on the third-party SOS monitoring partner. The detail under each section is the same writing the confirmation email will quote, so the page is the authoritative version rather than a re-statement of the same idea in different words.
Five short sections. About three minutes. If a line is unclear, write to us — the address is at the bottom of the page.
What a pre-order is
You are reserving a collar, not buying one off the shelf.
A pre-order is the workshop term for the deposit + light form you put down to hold a place in the first production batch. Nothing is shipped at the moment of reservation — the collar is made to your spec (strap size, engraving, optional extras) and dispatched when the batch ships. Until then, the pre-order is an expression of intent that we will not step on, and that you can step back from.
- The current pre-order covers the collar itself (hardware, strap, electronics) plus the 24/7 SOS monitoring subscription that comes with it for the first twelve months, baked into the deposit.
- A second pre-order window for accessories — spare straps, replacement buckles, an extra charging puck — will open later, but only after the first batch has been delivered and any warranty questions are working themselves out.
- Right now, the only pre-order you can place is via the waitlist: when reservations open, the queue is invited in the order the names came in.
Cancellation and refunds
You can step back any time before the collar is dispatched.
The deposit is fully refundable in the window before your collar is built. After that, the deposit is spent on the parts and printing, so cancellation becomes a partial-credit conversation rather than a clean refund. The two windows are dated on the order confirmation, and the actual numbers add up like this:
- Up to fourteen days after the reservation is confirmed: full refund of the deposit, no questions, no admin fee.
- Between day fifteen and the day the collar enters production (we email the date when it happens): full refund of the deposit, minus a small per-order fee to cover the payment processor and the workshop time on materials bought to spec.
- Once the collar enters production: a partial credit toward a future batch, or a fifty-percent refund if you would rather walk away. A full refund at this stage would mean reselling the collar at a loss from the workshop side, and we do not pretend otherwise.
- After the collar has shipped: the consumer-law rights below also apply — a faulty collar is replaced or refunded, not argued with.
Shipping and delivery
The first batch ships within Australia only, on a posted window.
The first production run is small enough that we ship only to Australian postcodes at launch. The window is posted the moment we know it, and the email you receive at that point names the same window this page will name by then. Until production starts we will not commit to a date we are not already certain of — the writing on this page is the same writing the confirmation email will quote.
- Standard delivery is by tracked Australia Post parcel, signature on delivery, with a packing slip inside the box that names the reservation and the order number.
- Australian delivery windows: capital-city suburbs arrive inside two to four working days from dispatch; regional postcodes three to six working days; remote and rural postcodes up to ten working days from dispatch.
- Express post is not on offer for the first batch — the workshop is the bottleneck, not the courier, and we would rather not promise a courier class we cannot improve on.
- International delivery, including rural-international, will open in a later batch once the Australian run is working well and the monitoring partner contract has finished being finalised.
Warranty and what it excludes
A two-year hardware warranty, with a short list of what it is not.
The collar hardware carries a two-year warranty against manufacturing defect — electronics, buckle, strap pull-through, charging contacts. A faulty unit is repaired or replaced; we choose which, depending on which is the faster fix for you. Consumer law under the Australian Consumer Law applies on top of this warranty and is not limited by it.
- Not covered: damage from a dog chewing, biting, or standing on the unit; the unit being clipped to an inadvisably heavy lead; the electronics being opened, modified, or charged with a non-approved cable; cosmetic wear on the strap cover, weathering, or fading from sunlight; antenna or signal issues caused by the monitoring-partner outage — those are handled under the monitoring-partner disclaimer below, not as a warranty claim.
- Not covered: third-party accessories that were not supplied by the workshop at the time of the reservation, even where they physically fit the collar. We do not chase down which strap is which; we only stand behind what we sent.
- Battery shelf-life is not treated as a defect for the first twelve months — a small drop in capacity is normal for the chemistry and is not a fault. After twelve months, an unusually fast drop is a warranty conversation, not an argument.
- Warranty claims: write to us with the order number, the photo, and a one-line description. We reply inside two working days and either send a pre-paid satchel back to the workshop or, if the diagnosis is clear from the photo, a replacement dispatched the same day.
A note on the monitoring partner
The 24/7 SOS desk is operated by a third party, name not yet committed.
The 24/7 SOS response that the collar is built to trigger is run by a separate Australian monitoring business — not by Lifeline Collars, and not by the workshop. Their operators receive the alert, place the call to the emergency contact chain, and keep the line open until either the situation is resolved or the emergency services have arrived. The workshop writes the collar firmware and owns the customer relationship; the monitoring partner runs the desk.
- The name of the monitoring partner is not yet on this page because the selection is still under the founder’s review. When the contract is signed, this section will be updated with the partner’s name, the certifications on their end (response time, after-call protocol, handling of medical-information flags), and a link to their own public standards — so a stockist or a senior’s family can read both sides of the contract before a reservation is placed.
- Service availability: the monitoring desk is a third-party service. Outages, scheduled maintenance windows, or a slow patch on the part of the desk are not Lifeline Collars warranty events, and a credit or refund for a missed SOS response is decided by the monitoring partner on their own incident-handling policy. We will tell you about a genuine outage the moment we know about it, but the credit question lives on their side of the contract.
- Until the partner is named, the pre-order is open in good faith on the published scope — hardware plus a monitored service, with no guarantee yet of the monitoring partner’s individual response-time targets. If you would rather wait for the contract and the published numbers, the waitlist still works without a deposit, and we will write to you when the partner is named.
Where to write to us about any of this
The best way to reach the workshop about anything on this page.
If a clause reads as ambiguous on the workshop’s side, or if the particular pre-order you have in mind does not fit the standard case, write in. Deb reads every email that lands in the workshop inbox, and the reply comes back from the Perth workshop, usually inside two working days — with a plain-language explanation and, where it applies, the actual credit or refund that the page above describes.
Prefer a structured form? The same inbox is on /contact.
Open the contact formThis page is written by the workshop and reviewed each time a new clause is added or a clause is retired. The most recent update is the date this paragraph was last touched — if anything on the site has changed since then, this page will say so, and the confirmation email that follows a new reservation will quote the same line.
Get in touch
Spotted something on this page that is unclear? Write to us — we read every one.