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#26 April 5 2019

AVOlio
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

I also think that The Seller (the place where i buy my products from, not the supplier or manufacturer or official dealer of the product here) should be responsible for every product i buy from him.
I would not even care if the product i am buying has an authorized service center here, or if it has an official warranty from the official dealer, i do not care about all those background details.   
For me, all i know is i bought this from you, please fix it or solve it, if the item is defective.

Regarding the behavior of duke-of-bytes, saying that he blocked you and started to bash your business right away, maybe his action was wrong and if he took another way into it, every thing could have been solved.

But i think when you told him " إذا CTC ما لاقوا شي أنا شو بعملك" that triggered his alarms thinking you're a bad and careless Seller. (and i stress seller! not reseller or retailer or anything, because me as a customer i do not care of the status of your business whether seller/reseller/retailer. for me, you are my seller).

And in my point of view as well, if you really told him that sentence, it is wrong thing to do as a seller.
Personally, it would seem to me that you are like the most Lebanese careless and inconsiderate Foxes that call themselves sellers.
I think what you should have done, is to offer a solution for him directly from your end, and that solution could have included for example from inviting him to do a personal check up of the phone by you , to even giving him a replacement, or as he asked, paying a difference and buying another phone.

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#27 April 5 2019

Salloum
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

This thread is beyond ridiculous. Stores who sell phones don’t manufacture them and aren’t liable. They’re merely brokers. You bought a phone with a warranty from CTC, the official Samsung agent. your complaint should be towards them.

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#28 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Salloum wrote:

This thread is beyond ridiculous. Stores who sell phones don’t manufacture them and aren’t liable. They’re merely brokers. You bought a phone with a warranty from CTC, the official Samsung agent. your complaint should be towards them.

stores will take the phone themselves and take care of this - similar to all IT shops ( including online ones like pcandparts ) they dont manufacture the IT gear , but they are liable to service their client .

Let's hope you dont have an issue with something you buy soon

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#29 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

here are several examples that happened with me last period

Purchased an HP server from Teletrade with a 5 years warranty - one disk arrived DOA - Teletrade took the disc and replaced with another one then they dealt with HP and as a sign of courtesy they sent me back the old fixed drive as a spare ( 600 GB 15K sas disc costing around 500$ ) i did not have to deal with HP but the seller

Purchased a lot of paper rolls for POS ( 4000 roll ) with a 5% chance that the roll is inverted (roll is made from 2 color white and yellow and sometimes they get inverted ) - found 15 rolls out of the 4000 to be inverted - the seller couldve simply told that's less than 5% but instead he send me a full box ( 45 roll )

got 2 128 GB flash disks from Sandisk , one died after 3 months , Sandisk sent me 2 replacement - ive even offered a video of me destroying the damaged disk , they declined stating they work on trust

same thing happened with my mother , she bought a fridge from Tahhan , the fridge has a motor issue , the next day their support came with a new fridge and replaced it - my mom did not have to deal with the company or the supplier

i also spoke earlier about amazon and lenovo

now Teletrade ( a Lebanese company ) , Sandisk , etc , they did the right thing , they stood behind their client - they also won a client for life , a client who will praise them in front of anyone else

this is accountability

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#30 April 5 2019

kareem_nasser
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Salloum wrote:

This thread is beyond ridiculous. Stores who sell phones don’t manufacture them and aren’t liable. They’re merely brokers. You bought a phone with a warranty from CTC, the official Samsung agent. your complaint should be towards them.

No one paused on the fact that CTC themselves cant do anything (correct me if i misunderstood) so if the seller wants to replace......he cant in this case.

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#31 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

kareem_nasser wrote:
Salloum wrote:

This thread is beyond ridiculous. Stores who sell phones don’t manufacture them and aren’t liable. They’re merely brokers. You bought a phone with a warranty from CTC, the official Samsung agent. your complaint should be towards them.

No one paused on the fact that CTC themselves cant do anything (correct me if i misunderstood) so if the seller wants to replace......he cant in this case.

Sellers and the supplier has different relation that the end user - i work for a retail group and we have this all the time
sellers would return their unsold items for a credit , Hyundai for example will give us up to 50% of back price if the car is not sold for a long time ,etc

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#32 April 5 2019

Salloum
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

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#33 April 5 2019

Aly
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Salloum wrote:

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

Indeed, I would definitely blame CTC for this one, now if CTC told him this phone is not genuine or "تهريب" then of course the seller or reseller is the one to blame.
I bought a Samsung Galaxy S5 bought from Carrefour back in 2014, didnt last a year, even though it went to CTC workshop several times and they didnt even bother looking at it I believe. This was my last Samsung smartphone.

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#34 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Salloum wrote:

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

if you got a your street supermarket , purchase a can of tuna and the tuna is bad .. wont they change it for you ?! they did not manufacture it , they just "stock the item"

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#35 April 5 2019

Aly
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

duke-of-bytes wrote:
Salloum wrote:

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

if you got a your street supermarket , purchase a can of tuna and the tuna is bad .. wont they change it for you ?! they did not manufacture it , they just "stock the item"

Given that enough proof is provided, yes the supermarket will give you a new Tuna can, then the supermarket will followup with the official distributor and get that tuna can replaced as well which in this case the supermarket will not bare any charges or fees during this whole transaction.
But in your case the official distributor did not acknowledge your problem (due to no fault in the first place or they're just bad at troubleshooting) and then you want the seller to take this problem on his behalf, replace the phone for you and bare the charges ... it doesn't make any sense.

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#36 April 5 2019

Joe
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

So is the phone defective, or not?

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#37 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Joe wrote:

So is the phone defective, or not?

CTC said the phone was not defective , but i saw opening marks on the device , i believe they changed the speaker

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#38 April 5 2019

potato
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

duke-of-bytes wrote:
Salloum wrote:

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

if you got a your street supermarket , purchase a can of tuna and the tuna is bad .. wont they change it for you ?! they did not manufacture it , they just "stock the item"

No the tuna is in the fault here because the tuna was inside the tuna can. Comparing between 3$ and 400+$ products should not be an example to begin with..
Anyway, buying a phone is a hit and miss in lebanon all warranties are a joke excluding apple products which i tried their warranty and they do actually exchange a faulty product.

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#39 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

potato wrote:
duke-of-bytes wrote:
Salloum wrote:

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

if you got a your street supermarket , purchase a can of tuna and the tuna is bad .. wont they change it for you ?! they did not manufacture it , they just "stock the item"

No the tuna is in the fault here because the tuna was inside the tuna can. Comparing between 3$ and 400+$ products should not be an example to begin with..
Anyway, buying a phone is a hit and miss in lebanon all warranties are a joke excluding apple products which i tried their warranty and they do actually exchange a faulty product.

i believe i stated above several other incidents like the HP sas disk ( more than 500$ ) , my lenovo thinkpad ( 500$ ) , etc
it is a principle

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#40 April 5 2019

Salloum
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

duke-of-bytes wrote:
Salloum wrote:

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

if you got a your street supermarket , purchase a can of tuna and the tuna is bad .. wont they change it for you ?! they did not manufacture it , they just "stock the item"

This is a poor comparison for many reasons, but I don’t think we will convince each other so I’ll move on. Just some advice, your beef is with CTC and not the store you bought the phone from, so if I were you I would channel my efforts into convincing CTC your device is faulty. Trying to pin it on the “small man” (compared to a company like CTC) and leaving bad reviews everywhere isn’t decent. Good luck.

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#41 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Salloum wrote:
duke-of-bytes wrote:
Salloum wrote:

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

if you got a your street supermarket , purchase a can of tuna and the tuna is bad .. wont they change it for you ?! they did not manufacture it , they just "stock the item"

This is a poor comparison for many reasons, but I don’t think we will convince each other so I’ll move on. Just some advice, your beef is with CTC and not the store you bought the phone from, so if I were you I would channel my efforts into convincing CTC your device is faulty. Trying to pin it on the “small man” (compared to a company like CTC) and leaving bad reviews everywhere isn’t decent. Good luck.

there is no small or big man .. there are only accountability and responsibility
my interaction was with phonefinity and i will deal only with phonefinity

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#42 April 5 2019

bobo619
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

The way i see it is that the store in question should have been more open with the customer. I understand you were being thoughtful by directing M.Christina to CTC directly seeing that she works close by and save her the hassle to wait for the phone recollection and procedures etc.. (time saving) but the fact you told the customer that there is nothing i can do since CTC did not find the device defective you kind of blocked his options for an RMA as in deal with it i am not reliable. You should have replied as in a will take a closer look into it. When customers buy from retailers, resellers or so on like khoury home and have a defective problem it is the store responsibility to follow up with customers and act as a middle man. I am a regular customer at CTC dbayeh and i can tell you onw important thing "all the people that work there are tech illiterate" they are trained only to upsell. I once visited the store in the intentetion of buying a high end new tv (10 000+$)the guy was trying to convince me that Qled is far superior than Oled and it was the new technology/innovation of tvs. I then asked if they have a Full array local dimming tv in their line up and all the employees started scratching theirbheads and had to call a technicien from abroad to answer my questions. My point being is that i doubt they know to identify a defective product even if it is obvious. Note that i never had a problem with phonefinity before and find your products very intriguing as you supply a niche market in Lebanon(Oneplus, Xiaomi and so on) but then i am not the one with a bad experience and i believe this should be solved in a friendly manner and you being transparent like that increased my credibility towards you.

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#43 April 5 2019

bobo619
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

I would like to add that the invoice was supplied upon demand and TVA evasion or not ( don't know the case) you can't blame someone in this country for doing so honestly. I like your products and what you offer keep it up and God bless

Last edited by bobo619 (April 5 2019)

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#44 April 5 2019

Salloum
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

duke-of-bytes wrote:
Salloum wrote:
duke-of-bytes wrote:

if you got a your street supermarket , purchase a can of tuna and the tuna is bad .. wont they change it for you ?! they did not manufacture it , they just "stock the item"

This is a poor comparison for many reasons, but I don’t think we will convince each other so I’ll move on. Just some advice, your beef is with CTC and not the store you bought the phone from, so if I were you I would channel my efforts into convincing CTC your device is faulty. Trying to pin it on the “small man” (compared to a company like CTC) and leaving bad reviews everywhere isn’t decent. Good luck.

there is no small or big man .. there are only accountability and responsibility
my interaction was with phonefinity and i will deal only with phonefinity

Suit yourself but I doubt you’ll get anywhere. If there really is a defect then CTC should exchange it and that’s that. Badak t7el meshkeltak aw badak trabbe el zalame? Up to you.

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#45 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Salloum wrote:
duke-of-bytes wrote:
Salloum wrote:

This is a poor comparison for many reasons, but I don’t think we will convince each other so I’ll move on. Just some advice, your beef is with CTC and not the store you bought the phone from, so if I were you I would channel my efforts into convincing CTC your device is faulty. Trying to pin it on the “small man” (compared to a company like CTC) and leaving bad reviews everywhere isn’t decent. Good luck.

there is no small or big man .. there are only accountability and responsibility
my interaction was with phonefinity and i will deal only with phonefinity

Suit yourself but I doubt you’ll get anywhere. If there really is a defect then CTC should exchange it and that’s that. Badak t7el meshkeltak aw badak trabbe el zalame? Up to you.

i dont care about the phone , i gave it to my driver , but i do not accept being treated like crap .
companies are closing , people are losing their jobs and yet some sellers can get away by treating their clients like shit

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#46 April 5 2019

AVOlio
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Aly wrote:

Given that enough proof is provided, yes the supermarket will give you a new Tuna can, then the supermarket will followup with the official distributor and get that tuna can replaced as well which in this case the supermarket will not bare any charges or fees during this whole transaction.

Exactly Bro,
He went to the supermarket, and the supermarket then can deal with the supplier/manufacturer or whoever he wants.
He did not go to the supplier/manufacturer himself.
The supermarket should be liable in solving the issues of His customers.

Say you bought an Asus RTX 2080TI card from pcandparts.
The card you received is defective.
What would you expect pcandparts to tell you?  Go to Asus and "dabber halak"?
No.
He should do that, and if he cant, he must replace the item.

And in this case, the shop should be liable in solving the case.(whatever way that he can, replacement, following up with ctc, refund, replacement for another item or store credit).

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#47 April 5 2019

duke-of-bytes
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

AVOlio wrote:
Aly wrote:

Given that enough proof is provided, yes the supermarket will give you a new Tuna can, then the supermarket will followup with the official distributor and get that tuna can replaced as well which in this case the supermarket will not bare any charges or fees during this whole transaction.

Exactly Bro,
He went to the supermarket, and the supermarket then can deal with the supplier/manufacturer or whoever he wants.
He did not go to the supplier/manufacturer himself.
The supermarket should be liable in solving the issues of His customers.

Say you bought an Asus RTX 2080TI card from pcandparts.
The card you received is defective.
What would you expect pcandparts to tell you?  Go to Asus and "dabber halak"?
No.
He should do that, and if he cant, he must replace the item.

And in this case, the shop should be liable in solving the case.(whatever way that he can, replacement, following up with ctc, refund, replacement for another item or store credit).

This is exactly what i meant!

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#48 April 5 2019

Mhdskr
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

In the midst of the tuna controversy did anyone else notice this?

duke-of-bytes wrote:
Joe wrote:

So is the phone defective, or not?

CTC said the phone was not defective , but i saw opening marks on the device , i believe they changed the speaker

so did CTC already fix the phone? I wonder

AVOlio wrote:

I also think that The Seller (the place where i buy my products from, not the supplier or manufacturer or official dealer of the product here) should be responsible for every product i buy from him.
I would not even care if the product i am buying has an authorized service center here, or if it has an official warranty from the official dealer, i do not care about all those background details.   
For me, all i know is i bought this from you, please fix it or solve it, if the item is defective.

AVOlio, based on my experience in this business and in this country I assure you that you are the rare exception, not the norm. when a customer calls to ask about a Samsung phone the first thing they ask about is whether it has CTC Warranty (by the way, Comtek, the name of the company that actually handles repairs, is owned and run by Samsung Korea, it's NOT a CTC subsidiary) and it's because of this warranty that they don't mind paying up to $100+ on a device compared to other sourced Samsung phones, and that's why, as I mentioned earlier, I state on my website the source of the warranty for each device. I'm being clear and transparent and I'm proud of it.

AVOlio wrote:

But i think when you told him " إذا CTC ما لاقوا شي أنا شو بعملك" that triggered his alarms thinking you're a bad and careless Seller. (and i stress seller! not reseller or retailer or anything, because me as a customer i do not care of the status of your business whether seller/reseller/retailer. for me, you are my seller).

And in my point of view as well, if you really told him that sentence, it is wrong thing to do as a seller.

I have no choice but to repeat myself here: I didn't say that! I said "iza CTC 3am bi2oulo ma fi shi ghalat bil telephone, ya3ne ma fi shi ghalat bil telephone, shu fiyye a3mel ana" which, again, echoes what others have said and I quote mmk92 again:

mmk92 wrote:

[...] If the issue is obvious, it doesn't make sense for CTC not to honor the warranty; if it's as bad as you described, they cannot pretend that it's not faulty.

He misunderstood what I said and instead of trying to negotiate and reasonably counter my argument he chose to be disrespectful. I could have pulled some strings you know and helped him with his (at the time) very simple problem but he chose to be disrespectful so let him go solve his problem on his own.

Moving on to Tarek's examples:
Teletrade is the official reseller of HP in Lebanon, so you can compare them to CTC, not to a reseller like me. FYI, when they replace something for a customer they don't pay a penny of their pocket. Actually they make money out of it bcz all manufacturers pay their authorized service centers money for every part/device they service or replace.
I don't know anything about POS but it's probably like the tuna example, basically comparing apples to oranges
Sandisk offer warranty for life for memory cards and these things can't be repaired, only replaced. they make these by the tens of thousand a day and they only cost them pennies each. I can work on trust for such a loss. for example, a couple of weeks ago I replaced FOR FREE a screen protector for a customer because it was DOA.
The fridge example is actually relevant, coz Abed Tahan offers his own warranty and that's exactly how I handle things when a customer encounters a problem with one of the items I import or with one locally sourced when I don't trust the local source warranty. I lost a pretty penny in this kind of situations and I don't regret it. It's part of the business.

Aly wrote:
duke-of-bytes wrote:
Salloum wrote:

What you’re basically implying is that the store, who does nothing but stock the item, is liable to replace a device that the company itself won’t replace. How does that make sense, exactly?

if you got a your street supermarket , purchase a can of tuna and the tuna is bad .. wont they change it for you ?! they did not manufacture it , they just "stock the item"

Given that enough proof is provided, yes the supermarket will give you a new Tuna can, then the supermarket will followup with the official distributor and get that tuna can replaced as well which in this case the supermarket will not bare any charges or fees during this whole transaction.
But in your case the official distributor did not acknowledge your problem (due to no fault in the first place or they're just bad at troubleshooting) and then you want the seller to take this problem on his behalf, replace the phone for you and bare the charges ... it doesn't make any sense.

Thank you, Aly, well said. I second that

AVOlio wrote:
Aly wrote:

Given that enough proof is provided, yes the supermarket will give you a new Tuna can, then the supermarket will followup with the official distributor and get that tuna can replaced as well which in this case the supermarket will not bare any charges or fees during this whole transaction.

Exactly Bro,
He went to the supermarket, and the supermarket then can deal with the supplier/manufacturer or whoever he wants.
He did not go to the supplier/manufacturer himself.
The supermarket should be liable in solving the issues of His customers.

Say you bought an Asus RTX 2080TI card from pcandparts.
The card you received is defective.
What would you expect pcandparts to tell you?  Go to Asus and "dabber halak"?
No.
He should do that, and if he cant, he must replace the item.

And in this case, the shop should be liable in solving the case.(whatever way that he can, replacement, following up with ctc, refund, replacement for another item or store credit).

I would have done that were he reasonable and respectful. After reading multiple interpretation of my sentence in this thread by multiple unbiased people, I can see now how my sentence could have been misunderstood but he really left no choice with his reaction.

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#49 April 5 2019

DNA
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

I never read the whole thread so maybe someone mentioned what i am about to say, as much as a respect you and your transparency running your business it's a good business model than is rare these days, but you have no right to send the guy to CTC you should be responsible for the phone and you should take the phone from him and mail it to ctc yourself the customer bought from you and you should be responsible for warranty claims and RMA. for example i RMA'd a pc part awhile back a company after more than 1 year of owning it they never told me go ship it yourself to the manufacturer but instead the came and picked it up from me and even gave me a replacement till my card comes back this is a very good customer service and ill definitely buy again from them and recommend. if i buy a Samsung from you in which am thinking of soon i will not accept you to tell me go to ctc for warranty that is not right. other than than duke probably didn't like the phone it's so low end and he regretted it and wanted an replacement

Last edited by DNA (April 5 2019)

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#50 April 6 2019

nas93
Member

Re: bad service from phonefinity

Crazy how the owner of phoneinfinity could've avoided this whole fiasco by just quite simply, replacing the $200 phone. I'd eat the cost and move on if I were you.

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