What the Australian Consumer Law means if you sell online courses

The Australian Consumer Law does not care that you recorded the lessons in a spare room in Adelaide, or that the platform’s checkbox said the sale was final. If you trade here, the people who buy your course are usually consumers, and the promises on the page are not decoration. They are the product.

This is a briefing for sellers in the creators hub: sole traders, small training businesses, the night-class teacher with a Stripe account. It is not legal advice. It is not a substitute for a solicitor who has read your page, your terms and your last three ads. Laws change, facts matter, and a journal is not your lawyer. If you need a decision that would survive contact with the ACCC or a tribunal, stop reading and get advice. Corrections and questions about our reporting can go through contact.

What follows is the shape of the arguments this desk keeps seeing: refunds, testimonials, outcome claims, and the cooling-off story that will not save a messy headline.

You are probably in the ACL whether you like the word “consumer” or not

The Australian Consumer Law sits in the Competition and Consumer Act and applies nationwide. It is the reason a buyer in Perth and a buyer in Hobart have the same basic protections when they purchase services. A digital course is, in ordinary cases, a service — sometimes bundled with downloads that look like goods. The label on your Kajabi theme does not decide this.

You do not have to be a company. A sole trader with an ABN and a Thinkific checkout is in the conversation. You do not have to be “big”. The ACL is famous in retail; it is not only about department stores. Education and training businesses have already met the ACCC and state fair-trading offices when the marketing ran ahead of the classroom.

There are thresholds and exceptions that a lawyer will walk through — business-to-business sales over certain amounts, for example. Do not decide you are exempt because the invoice has an ABN on both sides. Plenty of small businesses still buy as consumers when they are not large, and plenty of arguments start there. If the buyer is a department procuring for a hundred staff, you are in a different conversation that still includes misleading conduct.

The useful posture: assume the page must be true, the course must match the page, and a clever clause will not rescue a false impression. That posture also happens to be good teaching.

Refunds are not a vibe and “no refunds” is not a spell

Consumer guarantees for services include, in plain terms, that they will be provided with due care and skill, that they will be fit for a purpose you knew about, and that they will be supplied in a reasonable time. If those guarantees are not met, the law talks about remedies. Sometimes that is a repair, a resupply, a refund, a slice of money back. The facts decide. Your FAQ does not.

A digital course creates a particular mess because the student can, in an afternoon, download the templates and watch the videos. Sellers then say: they have consumed it, so no refund. Buyers then say: it was not as described, so I want my money. Both sentences can be true in the same week. The guarantee analysis is about the failure, not about whether you find refunds annoying.

Practices that keep turning up in complaints:

• The page promised personal marking. The inbox got an autoresponder.
• The page promised a live cohort. The “live” was a recording from last year.
• The page promised software access. The licence expired or never existed.
• The page promised a career outcome. The course was a lecture.
• The page hid the hours. The student needed a fortnight they were never told about.

A clean refund policy is still worth writing. Say what you will do if someone changes their mind in the first week and has not submitted work. Say what you will do if the platform fails. Say what you will do if they simply did not like your face. Change-of-mind is not the same as a guarantee claim. Being generous on change-of-mind can be good business. Pretending generosity replaces the ACL is how you write a paragraph a regulator can quote.

Chargebacks are not the ACL. They are a card network. Students use them when they cannot get a human. If your only refund desk is a US helpdesk closed on a Melbourne Thursday, you are designing chargebacks. The pricing piece is about the number on the button. This piece is about what happens when that number wants to come back.

If you sell through a platform that is the merchant of record, you still made the claims. “Talk to Teachable” is not a complete answer to a student who bought your name.

Testimonials are evidence. Treat them that way

The ACCC has spent years explaining that testimonials and endorsements can mislead. You do not need a famous case name to understand the plot. A result that is not genuine, not current, or not typical — dressed up as “what happens when you join” — is how a sales page becomes a problem.

Rules of thumb this desk would defend in an edit meeting:

• The person exists and took the course. Invented Australians are a firing offence here; they should be a firing offence on your page too. See how we treat sources in the editorial standards.
• The words are theirs, or a fair short form they have approved. A rewrite that inserts a dollar figure they did not say is not editing. It is fiction.
• The result is not a miracle you present as the average. One student who later won a job is not “our students get hired”. One café that lifted a weekend’s takings is not “add $10k a month”.
• You can show the context: they also had a degree, a cousin in the industry, a full-time job they kept. Context is how a testimonial stays honest.
• Paid reviews and affiliate cheerleading are labelled. If you would have to put rel="sponsored" on the link, you should not dress the paragraph as an independent love letter.

Video testimonials filmed under your instruction, with your laptop just out of frame, still count. So do screenshots of a five-star widget you have never rejected a review from.

If nobody has finished the course yet, you do not have testimonials. You have friends. Wait.

Students researching the other side of this marketplace can start with how to spot an online course scam. If your page would fail that piece, do not publish it.

Outcome claims are where training businesses come unstuck

“Get a job in six weeks.” “Replace your salary.” “Guaranteed clients.” “HR recognises this certificate.” “This is the same as a diploma.” These sentences sell. They are also the sentences regulators have seen in education marketing for a generation, from VET disasters to the latest cohort of digital coaches.

An outcome claim needs a basis you would be willing to show a stranger with a badge. How many students? Over what period? What does “job” mean — casual shift, related industry, the title on the sales page? What happens to the people who paid and left in week two? If you cannot answer, do not make the claim. Sell the artefact. Sell the hours. Sell the marking. Sell the narrow skill.

Recognition claims are a special Australian trap. A PDF with a laurel is not an AQF qualification. A university’s public short course is not automatically credit into a degree. A private badge is not a licence. If a professional body does not list you, do not imply they do. If a job ad in Parramatta once mentioned a vendor certificate, that is not “industry mandated”.

Comparison claims — cheaper than TAFE, faster than a graduate certificate, better than a competitor you name — need to be ones you can sit with. TAFE is often subsidised. Faster is only a virtue if the student finishes. Better is a word a tribunal will ask you to unpack.

This is editorial, not a statute book. The statute book talks about misleading or deceptive conduct and false or misleading representations. The practical translation for a sales page: if a reasonable student in Geelong would take the headline more generously than you can defend, rewrite the headline.

Cooling-off is a myth with a small true core

Internet folklore says every online purchase has a cooling-off period. That is not how Australian trainers should plan their week. Cooling-off rights attach to particular kinds of agreements — unsolicited consumer agreements are the example people reach for, the door-to-door and the unexpected phone pitch. An ordinary checkout a student walked into on their own is usually a different animal.

Do not advertise “you have ten days, that’s the law” unless a lawyer has tied that sentence to your sales method. Do not advertise “no cooling-off, that’s the law either” as if it cancelled the guarantees. Both slogans are how Facebook comments become policies.

There is still a decent business reason to offer a short, dated, change-of-mind window on a first cohort: you are still finding the broken lesson, and a clean refund is cheaper than a loud thread. Write the window so it is administrable. “Fourteen days or until they submit the assessment, whichever first” is a rule. “We are nice” is not.

Unsolicited selling is the place to be especially careful. If you are on the phone to a stranger, or in their workplace uninvited, or using a script that would look like pressure in a transcript, you may have walked into a part of the law this journal is not going to summarise in a paragraph. Get advice. The write for us page is not that advice. Neither is a Discord full of course launchers.

What the ACCC actually is, in practice

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is the national regulator people mean when they say “I’ll report you”. State and territory fair-trading offices handle a lot of the day-to-day consumer complaints. Tribunals handle some of the disputes. Not every unhappy student produces a regulator. Enough of them do, especially when the pattern is a sales machine rather than a classroom.

The ACCC publishes guidance on advertising, testimonials, subscription-like arrangements and unfair contract terms. It does not mark your course. It does not have to agree with your Twitter thread about personal responsibility. Education providers have been in its case history when promises about careers, qualifications or “free” extras came apart.

Unfair contract terms matter more than creators think. A wall of caps-lock that says the student waives everything, that you can change the course at will, that disputes must be heard in Delaware, that reviews are forbidden — these clauses can look strong in a Facebook group and weak in an Australian forum. If you copied US terms from a platform blog, have an Australian lawyer read them. This sentence is the least exciting in the article. It is also the one that prevents a certain kind of afternoon.

None of the above means you must be frightened of selling. It means the page should read as if a sceptical editor in Melbourne had a pass. True. Specific. Dull where dull is honest.

A short working checklist

Before you take the next payment:

• Every outcome, recognition and time claim on the page is one you could evidence.
• Testimonials are real, permitted and not dressed up as the average if they are not.
• The refund paragraph distinguishes change-of-mind from consumer-guarantee claims, and does not pretend the latter can be banned.
• You have not promised a cooling-off right you made up, or denied guarantees with a slogan.
• The terms were not pasted from a US template without an Australian read.
• The checkout matches the advertised price, in AUD, with a receipt a human can use.
• There is a way to reach you that is not a chatbot in another hemisphere.

If a line would fail how to spot an online course scam, it should fail your own edit. Sell the work. Mark the work. Price the work in a way you can defend on the Australian market. The law is not a marketing theme. It is the floor. For advice that is actually advice, use a lawyer. For a correction to this briefing, use contact.