The beachhead questions
The receipt is gone — thermal paper fades, gloveboxes eat paper, three winters pass. O'Reilly's published page answers with its bluntest sentence: "You MUST have the original sales receipt." And then, in §1.1, the same page hands you the counter-move.
O'Reilly's own terms say the purchase details you gave at the till are entered into the chain's national warranty database. That sentence exists so the company can administer warranties across 6,600 stores — and it is the factual basis for the ask: search the database. By the phone number you gave, by your name, by the card you paid with. Stores do pull records this way; the published receipt demand is the default posture, not the only mechanism the chain itself describes.
Go in with the reconstruction kit: the card statement showing the store, date, and amount; the approximate purchase date narrowed to a week; the battery itself (its date code corroborates the era). Every fact you supply makes the search shorter.
Trap one — the location rule. If you're within 25 miles of the store where you bought the battery, the published terms say the claim goes back to that store. Past 25 miles, call Warranty Administration (1-866-830-4351) first — taking it to the wrong store first can burn the trip and the day.
Trap two — discharged is not dead. §2 excludes a battery that was merely discharged and recharges and holds. If the store charges it and it "passes," the written fight is over capacity under load, not voltage at rest: ask for the load-test numbers and the printout, and get an independent load test if the car keeps killing it. The bench-test play covers the method.
Get the reason in writing, with the store and the employee's name. Then Warranty Administration — the desk the chain publishes for warranty routing — then the BBB file, which creates the formal record corporate answers. The full ladder is on the escalation page.
Not sure which wall you hit? The free checker sorts it in a few picks — chain, part, purchase date, your proof, and the store's own words — and gives you where you stand under the written policy, the proration math where it applies, the exact next counter move, and the ladder above the store. Run the checker →
The pages above are the map. The kit is the paperwork: the word-for-word counter scripts, the per-chain playbooks, the worksheets, and the complaint templates.
One payment, yours to keep. You do every step yourself — at the store, on the phone, in writing; we never call a store for you. See everything inside the kit →