Global

Each of us at least once, but went to Aliex­press in search of free­bies or huge dis­counts. But most buy­ers are afraid to make expen­sive pur­chas­es, due to ambi­gu­i­ties about war­ran­ty oblig­a­tions in the event of a prod­uct break­down. To date, most large stores have full-fledged ware­hous­es in the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion, as well as con­tracts for after-sales ser­vice. And even this makes you doubt when pur­chas­ing TVs, robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers or oth­er large and small house­hold appli­ances. In today’s arti­cle, I will tell my sto­ry about pur­chas­ing an expen­sive robot vac­u­um clean­er, iden­ti­fy­ing a defect in it, and my attempts to return the goods to the store under war­ran­ty.

On April 25, I pur­chased an Eco­v­acs Dee­bot N8 robot vac­u­um clean­er from a trust­ed Smart Life store for a rather large amount of 340$. Deliv­ery took place to the door by a couri­er from DPD. The total time from the moment of pay­ment and receipt of the goods took no more than 3 days.

This robot vac­u­um clean­er was bought to replace the old man Alfa­wise, who moved to anoth­er apart­ment. As for the Dee­bot N8, I could not get enough of it as a small child, because the vac­u­um clean­er can: rec­og­nize car­pets with an increase in pow­er when hit­ting them and dri­ving around while per­form­ing wet clean­ing, per­form com­bined clean­ing (wet + dry at the same time), sup­ports con­trol using Alice’s vir­tu­al assis­tants from Yan­dex, Google Assis­tant and Ama­zon Alexa, as well as build­ing com­plex maps and keep­ing 2 maps in mem­o­ry at the same time (for exam­ple, if you have a two-sto­ry house).

My hap­pi­ness from the acqui­si­tion did not last long, about a week. One fine day, I sent the robot vac­u­um clean­er for clean­ing and went about my busi­ness. After a while, I decid­ed to check the clean­ing sta­tus and saw that the vac­u­um clean­er “fell” into an error on laser nav­i­ga­tion. It seems noth­ing crim­i­nal, espe­cial­ly when we live in an apart­ment with a long-haired cat, I thought, and did not attach any impor­tance to this. But upon arrival home, I saw a robot in the mid­dle of the apart­ment with­out any signs of inter­fer­ence. At the same time, the appli­ca­tion sinned for the fail­ure of laser nav­i­ga­tion and the D‑Tof com­po­nent in par­tic­u­lar. Nat­u­ral­ly, I tried the sug­gest­ed options by the appli­ca­tion and even did a com­plete reset of the robot­’s soft­ware, but every­thing was to no avail.

The first thing that was decid­ed to be done was to con­tact the w3bsit3-dns.com forum in the pro­file thread for all Dee­bot mod­els from Eco­v­acs. Of the pro­posed solu­tions, there was one, banal one: many mod­els have a child­hood ill­ness in which the dri­ve belt flies off the lidar gear. It is treat­ed by dis­as­sem­bling and plac­ing the gum in its place. Since the robot vac­u­um clean­er is still under war­ran­ty, I did the analy­sis of the vac­u­um clean­er at my own per­il and risk (I do not rec­om­mend doing this) and, as a result, I did not see a prob­lem with the rub­ber band. But! I saw that the dri­ve does not spin when the vac­u­um clean­er is turned on, and this is already a prob­lem at a high­er lev­el. There­fore, we assem­ble the vac­u­um clean­er and pro­ceed to the sec­ond stage — the ful­fill­ment of the store’s war­ran­ty oblig­a­tions.

To do this, it was decid­ed to write to the per­son­al mes­sages of the store in order to receive any instruc­tions for action. And what do you think, the man­ag­er Kse­nia threw off a detailed pro­ce­dure, which I began to fol­low.

At the same time, I decid­ed to write to the offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Eco­v­acs in Rus­sia, but I received not the most rosy answer for me exact­ly 21 days lat­er.

We return to the Rus­ton ser­vice cen­ter, which ful­fills the war­ran­ty oblig­a­tions from the Smart Life store and trans­fer infor­ma­tion about my prob­lem to it. As you can see, there is noth­ing crim­i­nal, the ser­vice asks to fill out 2 appli­ca­tions for a refund or war­ran­ty repair.

We send the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion and wait for a response. And to be hon­est, I did not expect to see the answer on the same day, but he did. Rus­ton sent a DPD couri­er to pick up my robot vac­u­um the next day, ie May 13th.

After that, a painful wait began with an answer, which was inter­rupt­ed after 4 days with good news: “Your faulty prod­uct arrived at our place, passed the qual­i­ty check, the defect was con­firmed.” The next step is to agree on the replace­ment of the defec­tive prod­uct with a new one (if the lat­ter is in stock), or a refund. And since I filled out both appli­ca­tions, in gen­er­al, I was ready for any deal.

On May 19, a new email arrived say­ing, “Expect a pack­age with a new prod­uct.” Today, May 24, through mes­sages on VKon­tak­te, they wrote to me DPD in Rus­sia and told me the track num­ber, as well as the deliv­ery date for today’s date. Clos­er to 17.00, a couri­er arrived and hand­ed over a new robot vac­u­um clean­er.

Now let’s sum up. On May 12, I start­ed the war­ran­ty process, on May 24 I received a new prod­uct to replace the defec­tive one, and I did not pay a dime for it. In these 12 days, you need to add time for pick­up and deliv­ery, as well as for prod­uct diag­nos­tics. There­fore, being in close prox­im­i­ty to the MSC, you can sig­nif­i­cant­ly speed up the whole process.

What I want to say in the end, it’s clear­ly not worth being afraid to make expen­sive pur­chas­es on Aliex­press, as well as seek­ing the truth from stores. The only thing I would rec­om­mend pay­ing atten­tion to is the “War­ran­ty ser­vice in cer­ti­fied ser­vices” plate on the store page, as it will be eas­i­er to get a war­ran­ty repair or a refund.

But let’s assume what would hap­pen if I made a pur­chase in local chain stores (MVideo, CSN, Eldo­ra­do) and ran into a mar­riage. Para­graph 1 of Arti­cle 20 of the Law of the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion “On Pro­tec­tion of Con­sumer Rights” clear­ly states: “The peri­od for elim­i­nat­ing defects in goods, deter­mined in writ­ing by agree­ment of the par­ties, can­not exceed forty-five days.” And since I have already encoun­tered war­ran­ty repairs with one retail­er in the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion, then in the future you can eas­i­ly count on all 45 days. There­fore, Aliex­press is not a panacea, but still, most stores have a more loy­al approach to their cus­tomers. That’s all for me, all suc­cess­ful pur­chas­es and less mar­riage.

PS. At the begin­ning of this year, I pur­chased a new mod­el of a Realme smart­phone and it all result­ed in a 4‑month dis­pute. More details are described in the cor­re­spond­ing arti­cle at this link. This is for those who believe that in dis­putes, the buy­er will win 100%.