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Quick summary

Most buyers treat the commercial side of a parts listing as something to negotiate after they have found the part. On a marketplace it is usually already printed: the stock state, how many days you have to send the part back, who pays the postage when you do, the manufacturer warranty, and whether the price is fixed. We measured those fields across three separate bands of our own catalogue on 22 October 2026, and they are not uniform. There is no single aircraft parts return policy covering everything on offer — there is one per listing, and on one of the bands we measured it ran anywhere from one day to thirty-one.

Five fields that are already on the page

A listing in a structured catalogue carries more than a part number, a condition code and a price. Alongside those sit the commercial terms the seller has committed to for that specific item:

• Stock state — whether the seller has confirmed the item is physically on the shelf, or whether it is flagged as temporarily unavailable.
• Return window — the number of days allowed for a return, expressed as a figure rather than as prose.
• Return postage — which side carries the cost of sending the item back.
• Manufacturer warranty — a number of months, where the seller has entered one.
• Sale format — how the price is offered; every position we measured carried a fixed price rather than an invitation to bid.

None of these is a technical field, and none of them tells you whether the part is right for your aircraft. What they tell you is what happens if it is not.

What three bands of our own catalogue actually carry

We read three separate bands of the catalogue on 22 October 2026: the most recently loaded 100 positions, a band of 100 positions from the middle, and the last 70 positions at the far end. Each figure below describes the band it was taken from, on that date, out of roughly seven and a half thousand positions in all — so read the pattern rather than the percentages.

Field	Newest 100	Middle 100	Last 70
Stock confirmed by seller	100	0	16
Flagged temporarily unavailable	0	100	54
Return window of 7 days	100	99	0
Any other return window	none	1 (zero days)	70, across eight values
Return postage on the receiver	100	100	49
Return postage on the sender	0	0	21
Warranty months stated	0	0	2
Fixed price rather than offers	100	100	70

The counts in each column add up to the size of the band, which is the only reason we are willing to publish them: a field that is simply blank on half the records would otherwise look like a field that says something.

The return window is a listing field, not a platform policy

This is the finding worth carrying away. On the newest band every single one of the 100 positions carried the same seven-day window, which is exactly what a freshly loaded batch from one source looks like. On the last 70 positions there was no dominant value at all: the window was 1 day on 2 positions, 5 days on 12, 10 days on 22, 14 days on 13, 15 days on 10, 20 days on 1, 30 days on 9 and 31 days on 1. Eight different answers inside seventy items.

The practical effect is that an aircraft parts return policy is something you read off the individual listing, not something you assume from the site you found it on, and not something you discover after the part has failed inspection. A ten-day window and a one-day window are different products at the same price, in the same way that a release document changes what you are buying.

It also means two listings carrying the same part number can carry different windows, because in a catalogue of this shape one listing is one physical unit rather than one part number with a quantity against it. We set that mechanism out separately in our note on how a parts catalogue gets updated; the consequence here is that comparing two offers means comparing two sets of terms, not one.

Who pays the postage back

On both the newest and the middle band, every position placed the return postage on the receiver — the buyer. On the last 70 positions that held for 49 of them, and the remaining 21 placed it on the sender. There is no way to guess which you are looking at, and on a cross-border return the freight is rarely the expensive part: the duty already paid on the inbound shipment, and the paperwork needed to move an aviation article back out of the country, usually cost more than the airway bill. Our checklist on import documents for aircraft parts applies in reverse on the return leg, and it is worth reading before a part moves rather than after.

A blank warranty field is unstated, not absent

Across the two bands of more recent inventory, not one position carried a warranty figure. On the last 70 positions, two did — one at six months and one at twelve.

A blank field in a structured catalogue is an invitation to ask, not a declaration that no cover exists. The seller may well offer a warranty and simply not have entered it, or the item may be of a kind that is never covered. Those are opposite situations and the listing does not distinguish them, so the question belongs in the first message: is there cover, for how long, from what date does it run, and does it pay the freight on a failed unit. That last clause is the one that is usually missing, and a warranty that excludes return freight on a heavy rotable is worth considerably less than its duration suggests.

Stock state: read it rather than assume it

The split between the bands here was the sharpest of all. The newest 100 positions were confirmed in stock by the seller without exception. The middle band of 100 was flagged temporarily unavailable without exception. On the last 70, 16 were confirmed and 54 were flagged.

A listing that is flagged temporarily unavailable has not disappeared and is not a dead page — it is a record of something the seller has held, and it may be held again. But it is not a part you can order this afternoon, and treating a catalogue entry as availability is how an AOG day gets lost. When the state on the listing is anything other than confirmed, the request is the move, not the order button.

What to do with this before you order

1. Read the five commercial fields before you read the price. They take ten seconds and they decide what the price means.
2. Write the return window into your own purchase order. A window that exists on a web page and not in your paperwork is hard to rely on once there is a disagreement.
3. Count the window from the right date. Establish whether it runs from despatch or from delivery; on a long route those are two very different deadlines, and the inspection has to happen inside whichever it is.
4. Treat every blank as a question, not as a zero. Warranty, in particular.
5. Settle the return route before you need it. Who pays, who carries the risk in transit, and what happens to the duty already paid.
6. Do not let the terms decide the technical question. A generous return window is not a reason to accept a condition code or a release document your maintenance organisation will not take.

Where this sits next to the other checks

The commercial terms are the last of three readings of the same listing, and they are the one most often skipped. The condition code tells you what was done to the part, and our guide to reading an as-removed offer covers what each code promises. The quoted figure tells you what is included and what is not, which is the subject of our note on why three quotes on one part number differ. The commercial fields tell you what your position is if the first two turn out to be wrong — and if they do, what to do when a part fails receiving inspection is the step after this one. Read in that order, the three take a few minutes and remove most of the ways a parts purchase goes quietly wrong.

If you would rather state your terms up front than read someone else’s, you can submit an RFQ with the return and warranty terms you need written into the request, or register as a buyer to deal with verified suppliers directly. Current requirements and new listings are posted as they appear on the Aviatrading channel on Telegram.

The figures in this article are our own measurements of three bands of the Aviatrading catalogue, taken on 22 October 2026. They describe those bands on that date and are not a statement about the catalogue as a whole, nor about any other marketplace. This is commercial practice, not legal advice, and it does not replace your own contract terms.