Warranty claims

[ians]

I am in an interesting situation today. I call my friendly wholesaler to order a piece of equipment today, request a price and hear the same thing as everyone is saying...30 % increase in January due to rand dollar exchange rate, petrol price increase and now they have the etoll costing companies thousands of rands etc... etc ...etc...etc. Yeah ok so I understand all that, got stock yes we do cool I will collect shortly.

I collect the piece of equipment and this is what always blows my mind, not only is the piece of equipment designed and manufactured right here in SA but the manufacture date and test date is stamped on the equipment, 2007 which means the piece of equipment is "ALREADY 8 YEARS OLD". How would the one year warranty work should the company re label the product on the date of purchase.

The other problem I have is what if the customer gets another person in to do repairs and notes that the date on the equipment is 5 years before the store was built, would be a bit tricky trying to put in a warranty claim

The next time you purchase a photocell/ day night switch look at the dates generally they are sold a year after they are manufactured and have a 1 year warranty. The reason I always write the date installed on it.

[AndyD]

The customers warranty lies with their supplier which is you and your warranty lies with your supplier which is the wholesaler.
Manufacturers often obfuscate their manufacturing and testing dates by either making them into a code or putting one of those stupid circular date stickers on that can't be easily read for exactly this reason.


We have an arrangement with a couple of our suppliers that our warranrty date is counted from the date we install the device, not the date we purchase because we regularly hold obscure stock items on our shelves for longer than their warranty period.

[ians]

For 8 years?

[AndyD]

We do have some stock parts that are 8 years old, not many but a few. I know this because I completed stock taking a few days ago. We even have a couple of items that have been shelf stock for 12 years or more. As long as their in the original packaging and correctly stored I wouldn't see a problem with selling them on to an end user. We've never had warranty problems, the biggest headache is working out the price, we reference todays prices and add our mark-up from there. It's an interesting game, say for example we mark-up 65% onto our cost of replacement, we often sell items at over 10 or even 15 times the price we bought them for many years ago because of the Rand getting better at its toilet-paper impersonation over the years and obviously general inflation.