With nearly any high-ticket item you can purchase today, you get a warranty that guarantees certain performance expectations for a specified period of time. It's not so straightforward with software purchases, however. Complaints range from the use of overly complex legalese, to numerous disclaimers that seem to undo any promises that the warranty makes.

Indeed, software vendors seem to be in a class of their own when it comes to selling a product with little guarantee that it will perform in a way buyers expect. Here are a few things to keep in mind, before signing on the dotted line (click here for additional online resources).

Limited Coverage

Software vendors typically provide a limited warranty that promises the application will perform substantially in accordance with the documentation provided and that if it doesn't, a commercially reasonable effort will be made to repair it, either via bug fixes or at the next general patch distribution.

Vendors also might offer to reimburse what you paid for the product, but considering that the software purchase price is about 20% of the total cost of ownership, that's hardly a generous refund, says Al Case, founder of TechSpend LLC, an IT procurement advisory service in Tampa, FL.

In addition, software warranties often include bold uppercase letters disclaiming all warranties of merchantability -- which means the product is saleable -- and "fitness for a particular purpose," which means it will do what it says it will do, Case adds. He compares this to buying a cooking knife, where these warranties would guarantee the tool was good enough to be sold and designed to cut whatever it was advertised to cut.

"If you bought that knife, and it wouldn't cut anything, the seller would have an obligation to replace the knife," he says. Not to mention, the store that sold it to you might be able to turn around and sue the knife manufacturer if numerous customers had the same complaint or at least get reimbursed for expenditures like restocking fees.

More Disclaimers

With the number of disclaimers that vendors include in most software warranties, they often appear to be giving with one hand and taking with the other, says Gregg Kirchhoefer, senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, a law firm in Chicago. "They make a statement about what the warranty would be, and it's fairly limited in scope, and then everything else is disclaimed in order to take away from any promises made in the marketing materials or in what the salesman has said, either expressed or implied," he says.

For instance, most vendors limit their liability for direct damages, which are losses that are directly attributable to the software's failure to perform or a direct outgrowth of that failure, Kirchhoefer says. For instance, if a software failure results in your not getting labels printed in time to make a regular shipment, and you have to ship everything via Fedex, there are monetary damages attributable to that.