What we do, what the plant does, when your pour is actually confirmed, and who carries what when something goes wrong.
WORKING DRAFT · 22 August 2026 · not legal advice · not in force
This is a first draft written to give a lawyer something to mark up, not a document to put in front of a customer. Nothing here has been reviewed by anyone qualified, and several clauses depend on decisions the three of us have not made yet.
The single most important thing on this page: a blanket “we are not liable” clause does not work in New Zealand against a private customer. The reasoning is in sections 6 and 7, and it changes what we can promise to whom.
This has to be first, because everything else follows from it.
When you order through this site, your contract for the concrete is with Concrete Online. You pay us. We arrange the batching and delivery with a ready-mix plant, and we pay that plant. The plant does not invoice you and you do not have an account with them.
We are not a concrete plant. We do not batch, own or transport concrete. What we do is price the job openly, offer it to the plants that can serve your site, and stand behind the price we quoted you.
The figure shown on screen when you send your pour is the price of that pour, including GST, including delivery on the terms shown, and including every fee itemised in the summary. Nothing is added afterwards.
The price does not change depending on which plant accepts the job. If a dearer plant ends up delivering, that is our cost and not yours.
The price is held for the pour you sent. It is not a standing rate: change the mix, the volume, the date or the site and the price is recalculated before you send it again.
Volume is billed with a waste allowance — the percentage shown on your order summary — because a pour that runs short is a far worse outcome than a barrow left over. You are charged for the volume batched, not the volume that ends up in the ground.
Sending your pour is a request, not a booking. Nothing is charged at that point and no slot is held.
We cannot guarantee a particular delivery date. The day depends on which plant takes the job and how their week is loaded. The earlier you send a pour, the more likely you are to get the day and window you asked for.
You are responsible for the site. In practice that means:
Damage to driveways, kerbs, services or landscaping caused by getting the truck to where you asked it to go is not something we can carry. A loaded mixer is heavy and the driver will tell you if they think a surface will not take it — but the decision to bring it in is yours.
If the truck arrives and the site is not ready, waiting time and any return trip are chargeable, and we will tell you the amount before it is incurred wherever we can.
The concrete is batched by the plant to the specification you ordered — the strength grade, aggregate size, slump and finish shown on your order. Those are the things that are ours to get right, and if what turns up does not match what you ordered, that is our problem to fix.
What we do not undertake is that a correctly supplied mix will produce the outcome you wanted. Concrete is placed and finished by people on a site in weather, and most of what determines whether a slab is any good happens after it leaves the truck:
Where a defect is genuinely in the supplied concrete, our first step is to get the plant's batch record and, if needed, an independent test. We will not ask you to argue with the plant yourself — the relationship with them is ours.
22 August: “if we only connect supplier to client, we shouldn't be liable. Same as a travel agency is not liable for a cancelled plane.” That is a fair argument, the analogy is a good one, and there is a real version of this business where it holds. It is just not the version we have designed.
A travel agent books you onto an airline. Your contract is with the airline, you pay the airline's fare, you can see that fare, and the agent takes a commission for arranging it. When the plane is cancelled you deal with the airline, and the agent is not on the hook for your ruined week. That is exactly the position described above.
But the travel industry makes a second distinction that matters more to us. A tour operator — someone who assembles a trip, prices it as their own product and sells it at that price — is liable for what they sold, even though they own no aircraft and no hotel. That is the entire reason package-travel rules exist as a separate body of law. The operator is not protected by the fact that somebody else flew the plane.
Five facts, all of them deliberate choices we made for good reasons:
Every one of those is a marker of a principal rather than an agent. Taken together they describe the tour operator, not the travel agent. And they are not accidents — they are the four or five decisions that make “one price whoever brings it” possible at all.
The travel-agent position is genuinely available. It costs the things that currently make the product good:
One published price whoever delivers. We hold the money. The customer never negotiates and never sees a different number. In exchange we are the supplier of record: GST on the whole order, complaints come to us, and we cannot disclaim the concrete away from a consumer.
The customer contracts with and pays the plant directly. The plant's own price is what they see and it changes depending on who accepts. We take a disclosed fee for arranging it. We are far better protected — and we have given up the single price, the price transparency and the reason to use us instead of ringing round.
Even in the agent version, “not liable” is narrower than it sounds. We would still be answerable for our own conduct rather than the plant's: for describing the service accurately under the Fair Trading Act, for taking reasonable care in who we put a customer with, and for passing on the order correctly. A travel agent who books you on the wrong date is liable for that. The protection is against the airline's failures, not their own.
This is the section we asked for, and it is also the one where the honest answer is narrower than the question.
Under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, goods and services supplied to a consumer carry guarantees that cannot be excluded by agreement. Section 43 allows contracting out only where the goods or services are both supplied and acquired in trade, and only where doing so is fair and reasonable. The Fair Trading Act 1986 separately prohibits misleading conduct, and cannot be contracted out of at all in a consumer context.
A homeowner pouring a patio is a consumer. The CGA guarantees apply to what we supply, and a clause saying otherwise is void. Putting one in the terms anyway would be both ineffective and, arguably, misleading conduct in its own right. What we can do is be precise about what we supplied — concrete to a specification — as against what we did not, which is the placing, finishing and curing of it.
A builder or contractor buying concrete for their business is acquiring it in trade. There the CGA can be contracted out of by written agreement, and a liability cap is enforceable if it is fair and reasonable in the circumstances. This is the right home for a cap — typically at the value of the order — and it belongs in the trade account agreement rather than in a checkbox on a checkout page.
Before a plant has accepted, you can cancel or change anything at no cost — nothing has been committed on your behalf.
Once a plant has accepted and you have paid, the load is scheduled. Cancelling then may cost us the load, and we will pass on only what we are actually charged, shown to you before it is applied.
Volume can move on the day within limits. Where your order is more than one full truckload, the last part-load — the balance load — can usually be adjusted up or down once you can see how the pour is going, charged at the same rate per m³. A single load under one truckload is batched to the figure you booked and cannot be varied once it leaves the plant.
Private customers pay in full when a plant accepts. The pour is confirmed on payment.
Trade account customers do not pay per pour. Loads are billed to the account and settled on the terms agreed when the account was opened, across every plant that delivered in the period.
All prices for private customers include GST. Trade account pricing is shown GST exclusive.
We collect what we need to price and deliver the pour: name, contact details, site address, and what you told us about access.
Your site address and contact details go to one plant — the one that accepted the job — and at the moment it accepts. Plants we offered the job to and that did not take it are never given them.
We do not sell your details, and we do not pass them to plants for marketing.
Come to us first. Our contract is with you and the plant relationship is ours to manage — you should not have to work out which of us to argue with.
Tell us as soon as you can, and if it concerns the concrete itself, before the slab is covered or built on where that is possible. Photographs and the delivery docket help.