Resellers

After going several rounds with a reseller that I bought a new motherboard from, which arrived DOA, I am left with some confusion. He sent me an RMA# to ship the MB back to the manufacturer, instead of replacing it with a new item, even though it has been less than a week since it arrived. This likely means that it will be replaced with a refurbished MB, rather than a new one as I paid for. The reseller insists that ALL online resellers operate in this fashion, but then after thinking about it, I thought that perhaps that venders such as Newegg, TigerDirect, etc. may not be defined as resellers, since I think that they maintain their own inventory. I would like to better understand this, because it will have a very strong bearing on how I do business in the future. What is the story?

Hi There..

There is nothing worse.

It's usually down to the manufacturer to advise on how wholesalers/resellers deal with DOAs. It's quite common for items like Motherboards to be fixed by returned to the manufacturer instead of having your cash back. A lot of resellers are at the mercy of the distributers when it comes to how to handle these sort of problems.

I'm sure if it takes more than 3 months for your Motherboard to be returned, you can demand your cash back or a swap.

They might try and repair your own motherboard..

I just got mine back today, so the time wasn't too bad. It is a different serial number, so they didn't just fix the one that I sent them, though the numbers are only 16 digits apart, which seems odd. I haven't had time to test it yet...I really hope that it works.

But to my original question...is there any easy way to identify who is a reseller by looking at their website? Judging from past experience, I tend to doubt that a vender would be too open to enquiries.

I just found this:

http://www.resellerratings.com/

Odd that I found the link on ZipZoomFly because their rating does not flatter them at all. I just bought a couple of harddrives from them, I hope that I will be one of their happy customers. Who had the highest rating...ClubIt. Since their list was of just about every name that you normally hear of and more, it would appear that the definition of reseller that I gave above is incorrect, because some of them do carry their own inventory.