3rd Party Retailers

[Waggs]

TL;DR - Vendors choose to not honor warranties, if the item was purchased through a 3rd party retailer.

Maybe I'm the last person ever to encounter this, and I'm curious what the attitude or necessity is behind it.

I'm currently working through a process now. It started by calling the vendor to find out what I needed to do, and after some digging on my part, I received this email:

Thank you for sending that invoice. Unfortunately RV & Autocrats is not a customer of XXXXXXXX so I have no record of them purchasing the items. My best advice at this point would be to reach out to them and see what type of warranty they offer. It would also. Be beneficially to see who they receive their products through as some of the supplier companies like Quadratec etc. offer warranties for the products they sell to smaller businesses.

So I am working with RV, who is submitting a form (with pictures) with the supplier to go back to XXXXXXXX(?). The kind lady at RV who is helping me said this is common behavior.

So I'm curious, what is it about items sold by 3rd party retailers? Is this just the way things are? Are 3rd party retailer a scourge on retail? As a consumer, this sure has me scratching my head.

And FWIW, the item is Gladiator related, and the vendor is a sponsor on this site.

Waggs

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[Hootbro]

Yeah, not uncommon. Many times it is to protect "authorized" retailers and their MAP pricing.

Where did your third party retailer get it from? If from the OEM, it may have been sold at a discount to your third party retailer with the understanding they assume warranty risk.

There is also bankruptcy liquidation avenues where a authorized dealer went out of business and your third party retailer bought it from a liquidation company.

Bottom line, it is one of those things OEM's can get away with legally and minimize their liability. I have run into this with third party Amazon sellers on some name brand tools like Grey Pneumatic that sells a top quality product but they are anal about where you bought it from when it comes to warranty.

 

[Steven_B]

Some manufacturers do this also to combat counterfeit products. Working at ARB for many, many, years, we would see broken fake ARB compressors and Intensity lights returned to us all the time for warranty work. And unfortunately, the customer thought they were getting an actual ARB product and not a knockoff.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

One reason I buy from authorized sources whenever I can if I am at all concerned about warranty.
A friend bought software from an Amazon seller. After a few weeks he was contacted by Microsoft and the law was 'sicked on him'............
Turns out the product he bought as Microsoft was a copy that was supposed to OINLY be sold with a computer. He worked with Microsoft and got the seller shut down and Amazon had some 'splainin' to do and promised to be more careful.

Warranties cost money to administer and deal with for a manufacturer so they try to protect themselves by using such methods as only working with certain sellers and so on.

For some things - I contact the company and ask for a list of their authorized resellers. I've normally ended up in better shape that way and those authorized resellers are more likely to be friendly with any issues you may have.
There's a lot that happens in the background in such relationships.

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