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Hello people,
Entrepreneurship comes with its obstacles to be overcome, and this is one of them. I would greatly appreciate your opinion/view on this and I hope @Walter Hay can chime in on this too. My inventory that came from China arrived in my home country and I found a couple of things wrong with it and I might apply for Alibaba's trade assurance (I'm not getting my hopes up that it will succeed).
1) I designed a custom packaging and choose black as the background color, not realising that it would get scratched easily. The packaging of the product look damaged like this (click on the picture to enlarge):
I wonder whether this happened during transportation (via railway), since it was not wrapped in protection foil or something and I haven't asked for it to be. Is this something that is my fault and can not hold the supplier accountable? Or is this a good reason to apply for a refund or repair?
2) I was traveling in Brazil while sourcing this product, a table lamp. It is very hard to get samples into Brazil, so I stupidly decided that the sample would get sent to my parents in another country for me to inspect. I skyped with my parents to inspect the products and because video is not the same as having it in your hands, I did not see and realise that the product does not have warm yellow light. It only has plain yellow (among the other colors) which is not suitable as a table lamp. Also the esthethics of large version of the product is far worse than what the product page images promise, which makes it a far more inferior product than what the competition provides. The medium size version I got has the correct aesthethics somehow.
On top of that I did write in the PO that one of the colors should be warm yellow (maybe warm white is the correct term?) and supplier told me that she would attach the PO to the Alibaba order, but she never did. I do have proof that she said she would. But she also has not put a signature onto the PO.
Is it reasonable to ask for a repair or refund for this? Or is it my fault that I didn't expect the sample correctly, although she did say that the sample would also have warm yellow LED and I expected the aesthethics to look like the picture on the product page?
3) So my supplier is a trader who got the products from a factory. She has been good to me and I hate the fact that this problem comes between us now and I would like to work with them in the future. Do you think that if I apply for a repair or refund, that they will not want to do business with me anymore? Or will they accept my business because my complaints might be legitimate? Do they have to pay the refund out of their own pocket or can they hold the manufacturer also responsible?
Looking very forward to your opinions to solve this difficult problem. Maybe you have some other advice on how to deal with this.
Thank you!
-LPPC
Entrepreneurship comes with its obstacles to be overcome, and this is one of them. I would greatly appreciate your opinion/view on this and I hope @Walter Hay can chime in on this too. My inventory that came from China arrived in my home country and I found a couple of things wrong with it and I might apply for Alibaba's trade assurance (I'm not getting my hopes up that it will succeed).
1) I designed a custom packaging and choose black as the background color, not realising that it would get scratched easily. The packaging of the product look damaged like this (click on the picture to enlarge):
I wonder whether this happened during transportation (via railway), since it was not wrapped in protection foil or something and I haven't asked for it to be. Is this something that is my fault and can not hold the supplier accountable? Or is this a good reason to apply for a refund or repair?
2) I was traveling in Brazil while sourcing this product, a table lamp. It is very hard to get samples into Brazil, so I stupidly decided that the sample would get sent to my parents in another country for me to inspect. I skyped with my parents to inspect the products and because video is not the same as having it in your hands, I did not see and realise that the product does not have warm yellow light. It only has plain yellow (among the other colors) which is not suitable as a table lamp. Also the esthethics of large version of the product is far worse than what the product page images promise, which makes it a far more inferior product than what the competition provides. The medium size version I got has the correct aesthethics somehow.
On top of that I did write in the PO that one of the colors should be warm yellow (maybe warm white is the correct term?) and supplier told me that she would attach the PO to the Alibaba order, but she never did. I do have proof that she said she would. But she also has not put a signature onto the PO.
Is it reasonable to ask for a repair or refund for this? Or is it my fault that I didn't expect the sample correctly, although she did say that the sample would also have warm yellow LED and I expected the aesthethics to look like the picture on the product page?
3) So my supplier is a trader who got the products from a factory. She has been good to me and I hate the fact that this problem comes between us now and I would like to work with them in the future. Do you think that if I apply for a repair or refund, that they will not want to do business with me anymore? Or will they accept my business because my complaints might be legitimate? Do they have to pay the refund out of their own pocket or can they hold the manufacturer also responsible?
Looking very forward to your opinions to solve this difficult problem. Maybe you have some other advice on how to deal with this.
Thank you!
-LPPC
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