Re: Ebay (Was Re: Selecting vendors)

[Greg House <ghunicycle@yahoo.com>]

--- Jeff Shirkey <jcshirke@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> >It sounds to me like you knew the keyboard was not out yet in the 
> >US, so something must have been up.
> 
> But when I talked to yamaha tech support and specifically said, "Hey, 
> guys, did you know that there's someone on ebay selling the ES 
> already?"?? And they basically told me, "Yeah, so...?" In other 
> words, they gave me no reason to think I might encounter problems if 
> I bought one.

Ok, maybe I'm missing something here between these messages. Let me repeat 
back
what I thought I heard.

- First, you ordered the Japanese version of a new Yamaha product from a 
dealer
with a good reputation on ebay. This product isn't available through US 
dealers
yet. 
- Then you talked to a LOCAL dealer, who claimed you couldn't get warranty
support THROUGH THEM on the product.
- Then you cancelled your order from the ebay vendor.

- Somewhere along the way, you talked with Yamaha tech support directly.

Ok, so the LOCAL DEALER says they won't touch your device. Big deal. In my
experience, local dealers only broker repairs back to the vendor, and most 
of
them will accept the repairs directly. So you'll get a much faster repair 
if you
send it directly to the mfg's repair center instead of taking it to the 
local
dealer. 

Case in point. I had an ADA guitar preamp a few years ago. It had a 
problem. The
local ADA dealer was also an ADA "authorized repair center". I took my box 
to the
local dealer. They immediately sent it to their office in a neighboring 
city
("Where the repair shop is")...3 days delay before the "repair shop" got 
my box.
It sat there for a week. They put it in another box and shipped it to ADA 
using
the slowest ground shipment method they could get. Another week in transit.
Finally three weeks after I dropped my box off for a "quick repair", the 
ADA
repair place calls me up asking what's wrong with it! The local boneheads 
hadn't
even passed on the problem description!! ADA had it repaired in 1 day, 
sent it
back to the "local" shop's repair shop (60 miles away from my "local 
shop") where
it sat for another week before they sent it down to the shop in my city. 
Then it
sat there for another week or so before they bothered to call me and tell 
me it
was back. So....what did I get for all this? A $20 surcharge on top of 
what ADA
charged for the repair (yeah, they left the receipt from ADA in the 
box...), and
an entire MONTH of additional waiting time. To complete a repair which 
took the
shop one day to get to and complete. The guy from the ADA shop told me 
that I'd
have been better off sending it to them directly, that they didn't have a
backlog.

So, when you called Yamaha tech support, you said they didn't seem 
concerned that
it wasn't released in the US. Does that mean they'll honor the warranty 
and give
you support on the product? If so, what's the problem?

I had a Yamaha efx unit repaired under warranty recently and this required 
no
interaction with a local dealer. I emailed yamaha tech support, exchanged 
two
messages with them about the nature of the problem, they sent me an RMA 
number
and an address to send it to. A couple of weeks later, they called to 
discuss the
problem. A week after that, my box was back at home, working properly.

To me, it sounds like the local dealer is trying to smear the deal with FUD
(fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to get you to buy it from them.

> I certainly learned a lesson. And I went into it thinking 
> (mistakenly) that I had all bases covered. I didn't go into it 
> blindly--just not as informed as I ought to have been.

Could that lesson have potentially been "Don't listen to the self-serving 
local
dealer?"

Greg

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