22nd
How to get your money back, the easy way!
Here’s how you do it:
After a bad eBay experience, you decide to go the route of purchasing your kids a used iMac from an “established” retailer. In this case, the company’s name is Gainsaver.com. Write that down. You’re going to want to refer back to it later.
So, this place gets good enough word-of-mouth from two sources - one anonymous online; another, a friend of an online friend. You pony up for a 17” Intel Core Duo iMac, and await its arrival. It arrives in a timely manner, but when you open this package, you find you were mistakenly shipped an iMac G5, not an Intel. Bollocks, right? But what reputable company doesn’t take responsibility for mistakes like this? They’ll just replace it with the correct one, you tell yourself, and you feel pretty confident that this should occur at no additional cost to you.
So I (okay, it’s about me, not you) enter a help ticket, explaining what happened, and ask how to proceed with an exchange. And they write back telling me, “return your product on the website.” That is all. Okay, I’m a bright kid, so I go to the web site and submit a return request, after which I call to follow up. The guy on the other end of the phone - who identifies himself as the sales manager (and who tells me there’s no one else I can talk to besides him, when I try to escalate a few minutes later) - tells me that, after I return the computer to them and it’s confirmed to be the computer they sent me (which I’m wondering how they’re going to do), I will receive a store credit with which I can do what I want. I ask, is Gainsaver going to cover the cost of return shipping? No. No, they’re not, he tells me. I ask why not, and he replies, “Because that’s our company policy. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“Yeah, but this was your mistake. You sent me the wrong thing. Why should I have to pay to have you replace it with the right thing?” I press on.
“Because that’s our company policy. IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I CAN HELP YOU WITH?”
Anything ELSE?
No. But let me help you, Gainsaver, and let me help any of my friends I can:
Avoid Gainsaver.com. Avoid them completely. They’re customer-hostile, and refuse accountability as a matter of policy. You’re no better off there than on eBay or, for that matter, giving your checking account information to a 419 scammer. Avoid them.
Here’s where you go back to that thing I had you write down: Next time a friend asks you if you have any advice on where to get a used computer, consider warning them about Gainsaver. You can give them my email address. I’ll give them the longer version of the story I’ve niced up and dramatically condensed here. You’ll be doing them a huge favor, and they will thank you for it.
So, yeah. There’s my blog-as-a-Public-Service-Announcement-platform. I’ve had awfully bad luck, trying to get my kids a computer. Hopefully, the good that comes out of it is that one of you doesn’t get rooked in any of the seemingly endless ways I’ve managed to.
Yeah. Definitely avoid these guys; they sound like scum.
But if something like this happens to you, the moment the retailer gives you the slightest bit of trouble over the return, call your credit card company and dispute the charge. Doing so a) removes the purchase (and any associated interest charges) from your credit card statement immediately, and b) puts the ball squarely back in the vendor’s court. It becomes their loss if they don’t facilitate the return. You’ll probably have a prepaid return shipping box at your doorstep within days.
The big secret is that in online credit card purchases, a.k.a. “card not present” transactions, the buyer has every advantage. As long as you file your dispute within 60 days and fill out and notarize all the forms correctly, you’ll pretty much automatically win. Just try not to spend any more money along the way (like by shipping the wrong item back at your own expense), since those costs can be more difficult to recover.
Good luck, Geoff.
