It's a complete coincidence that these two incidents happened almost back to back with pretty much identical results. The sellers are amazon.co.uk and Other World Computing, OWC and macsales.com, a US-based tech company.
I ordered a specialist bracket from OWC on March 29th, total bill including postage came to €13.69, hardly likely to break any banks. Fast-forward 7 weeks and the item hadn't shown up. I contacted them by email, reported the missing part and was asked to agree to return the original item at my cost if it showed up. I agreed. Three days later, last Friday in fact, a courier handed me my replacement. OWC paid for the courier. I fitted the part, designed to allow the accommodation of 2.5/3.5 inch HDDs and/or SSDs in an empty optical drive bay.
I've bought from OWC before, €35/40 at a time, a Joe Soap consumer for the specialist items they design & manufacture or distribute for others. Superb outfit.
In March 2018 I bought a 4TB external HDD from amazon.co.uk for use as a real-time back-up drive for my old MacPro "cheese-grater" system, all 20kgs of it! Total price including shipping was €109.13, €60 cheaper than any Irish retailers I checked. Over the week-end it started showing errors and I invested quite a bit of time extracting data from it to store on other media. Last night, Sunday, it refused to power up and issued ping-ping-ping noises; a completely dead duck.
This morning at about 8:40 am I contacted amazon tech support via their chat line. I ended the chat at 9:25 am with a returns authorisation, full instruction and pre-addressed courier label in my inbox and a commitment to have a full refund onto my card in 5/7 working days. About 45 minutes for all typed negotiations with a fully detailed transcript emailed to me. I'm confident we could have reached the same conclusion in less time over the phone, but without the transcript.
Irish retailers feel free to comment.
I ordered a specialist bracket from OWC on March 29th, total bill including postage came to €13.69, hardly likely to break any banks. Fast-forward 7 weeks and the item hadn't shown up. I contacted them by email, reported the missing part and was asked to agree to return the original item at my cost if it showed up. I agreed. Three days later, last Friday in fact, a courier handed me my replacement. OWC paid for the courier. I fitted the part, designed to allow the accommodation of 2.5/3.5 inch HDDs and/or SSDs in an empty optical drive bay.
I've bought from OWC before, €35/40 at a time, a Joe Soap consumer for the specialist items they design & manufacture or distribute for others. Superb outfit.
In March 2018 I bought a 4TB external HDD from amazon.co.uk for use as a real-time back-up drive for my old MacPro "cheese-grater" system, all 20kgs of it! Total price including shipping was €109.13, €60 cheaper than any Irish retailers I checked. Over the week-end it started showing errors and I invested quite a bit of time extracting data from it to store on other media. Last night, Sunday, it refused to power up and issued ping-ping-ping noises; a completely dead duck.
This morning at about 8:40 am I contacted amazon tech support via their chat line. I ended the chat at 9:25 am with a returns authorisation, full instruction and pre-addressed courier label in my inbox and a commitment to have a full refund onto my card in 5/7 working days. About 45 minutes for all typed negotiations with a fully detailed transcript emailed to me. I'm confident we could have reached the same conclusion in less time over the phone, but without the transcript.
Irish retailers feel free to comment.