Digitec Galaxus now displays warranty score and return rate
galaxus.ch
galaxus.ch
- price history so you can see when sales are fake
- one click "deliver to my closest branch and I will pick it up and pay there so I don't have to muck around with online payments" option
- automatic high quality translation of all product information and reviews into all offered languages
- simple downloads on order page for invoice and receipt
And many other things. Some things are still annoying like they don't accept cards from some countries, but they get a lot right.
With the EEA being what it is, I'm really surprised they can keep afloat since ordering from literally anywhere else ought to be cheaper just by labour costs involved alone. These days even Amazon.de doesn't get many of my orders anymore since they're reselling the exact same crap Aliexpress has for a quarter of the price.
As such if you're trying to sell to anyone who's not in the same purchasing power range or higher (aka literally nobody when it comes to Switzerland) you'll run into problems as you can't compete with vendors operating at lower costs in those countries. It's just basic arithmetic.
That's what makes Switzerland one of the worst places one could manufacture and/or stock things and China one of the best. Exploitation of the poor is the optimal business choice, after all it's the very foundation upon which capitalism itself is built.
Toppreise and google shopping (yeah…) often can find better deals on the same items even after shipping.
Personally, I prefer paying a few francs more and in return get the certainty that I get what I ordered reasonably fast.
I never had a problem with deliveries from them, alas, high ticket items I picked up personally.
The only one time where they couldn't deliver a couple of USB chargers for a couple weeks because it was out of stock and the supplier couldn't supply I cancelled the pending order and had the money credited to my credit card.
Not having to deal with some dodgy outfit is worth the slight surcharge to me.
I wouldn’t pay 20% more but 5 or even 10% is reasonable.
That's how you do VAT, compared to all EU countries around who screw their population left and right because they have big public debts and getting worse, while employing armies of unemployable bureaucrats who do almost nothing and have ridiculous safety and social nets.
The world could learn a thing or two on how Swiss run things in general and especially government stuff, but the problem is this is not transferable elsewhere, people are simply... different to be polite.
Best example is a Brezel. A fresh Brezel is like $4, but a buttered one (done by human) $8-$9.
Not the butter is expensive. Humans just get proper money for their work.
They didn’t seem to reach Day 2 yet either.
If Bezos and company weren’t being either disingenuous or delusional, Amazon has reached day two years ago.
Super clean, very logical, everything exactly you'd expect it to be, superb filtering system for searching through long product lists, etc. It's also super-snappy, at least from within Switzerland.
in case you were unfamiliar https://camelcamelcamel.com/ does this for amazon
This makes it difficult for a human being trying to buy things to compare the prices, let alone a series of scripts.
But still it's the best we have...
I've started using this as much as possible, especially during christmas. You find something, "in stock", supposed to be delivered the next day or a day after, you order, then nothing one day, two days, three days, then you call, "yeah, it's still with the distributer, it'll be ready tomorrow", two more days pass, you call again, want a refund, they "cannot refund now", because the product is supposedly in the mail already, then you wait, christmas goes by, and around 15. january you get a call, that they cannot get the item you wanted, and try to upsell some either more expensive or worse option.
Now I just order for physical pickup and "pay there" option.. and if it's not there, cancelling is easy, because they don't have your money yet, and they cannot lie about the item being already sent.
Nowadays people prefer to use UPI[1] over cash in even local store counters making India the largest real-time payment transactions country.
Its amazing that both of those happened within a decade, Largely synonymous with mobile compute & Internet penetration.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
This is now a law enforced in European Union to display such history (at least the lowest price in last 30 or more days so customer knows if the price was not fake rised just before lowering it and calling it a sale). WooCommerce has a plugin for that now[1].
I've never noticed it, maybe it's not in an obvious place.
and screenshot
"Najniższa ostatnia cena: 179zł" just under the price is the text required by EU directive.
That suggests a really sorry state of things, not something to copy. Online payments shouldn't be harder than physically going to a store and paying for the item.
Why ?
It's probably more energy efficient to have trucks going to the few branches for pickups than to every single individual house.
I don't see why it "shouldn't" be, especially since it's optional
> That suggests a really sorry state of things,
The really sorry state of things are people ordering toilet paper &co in same day delivery on amazon because they can't bother walking 5 min to the closest store
Is this a serious question? Why should online payments be so difficult that it makes sense to spend even 2 minutes getting out of the door and walking to a store directly across the street? You autofill your card information and click "pay".
>The really sorry state of things are people ordering toilet paper &co in same day delivery on amazon because they can't bother walking 5 min to the closest store
But why? It's cheaper on Amazon.
Also all the stores trying to railroad me into buying delivery instead of just telling me which store has it in stock.
Amazon does not even support sitemaps. (They did in the early days.)
Only Twint is just as easy as paying with crypto.
Uh, gotta disagree here, speaking as a regular Galaxus shopper in both en & fr locales. The automated translations are mostly terrible when not entirely misleading or vulgar. For instance, the French ones are so bad there are Twitter accounts dedicated to them[1]. This applies to both product titles and descriptions.
To be fair, this is not surprising: the machine translator has very little to work with when translating short product names, in addition to these being full of puns (in whatever source language) or English-looking words for marketing purposes. It's a shame no ML company seems to have taken the opportunity to fine-tune their model for product name translation and sell that for $$$ to big marketplaces.
Recently I had a set of headphones fail after ~1 year and all I had to do was find the item in my order history click a button, answer a few questions and in this case they just credited the amount to my account, didn't even have to send them back. Instructions told me to recycle them.
There is a certain amount of trust in the system.
However it can also go wrong. Once I sent a GPU for repair because a fan stopped working and it was still under warranty. Sadly they or their repair center marked it as a no fix, recycled the card and I was credited the amount I paid, sadly that was during the GPU crunch and a card that had similar performance was not available for even close that price. Replacing a fan I could have done my self but I thought a warranty claim would be the correct thing to do incase something else breaks.
Switzerland operates on trust. You go to the car service, you get the work done, you leave, you'll receive a bill in the mail later. There is trust that they do the right work and not overcharge you, and there is trust that you'll pay.
Just be sure to mark everything in the ledger, so the hut warden can replace it easier.
Being that close to nature long enough does things to a person. It's outside of something easily described with any human words.
And yeah, it's a high-trust society. In some farms you'll find a fridge where you can get local produce and leave your payment in the box. Especially so in the mountains where they make their own cheese. You'll find me lugging a nice cut of cheese back home from a Sunday hike. That box will be locked though, because there's more people passing than at a remote cabin :-)
This ethos percolates down, well beyond empowering the minority via direct democracy: its shameful on the individual to not carry one's weight. The smallest unit is the one to trust.
Contrast that to other collectivist societies, with top heavy bureaucracies, where the top literally cannot carry their weight (debt/deficits) and the populace is always looking for the biggest bureaucracy to rescue them.
There's no trust in people, because people are competing to weaponize the large state to screw... you.
Pretty common round here. (in NZ)
Often people just leave remote dwellings like that unlocked and stocked with supplies, sometimes with a signature book and/or donation box. For larger places some people even build a separate cabin next to the main house for travelers to use.
Then I go home to eastern Europe (we call it central Europe back home, lol nobody wants to be branded as east European since it reeks of russian association which for a long time means something very negative) and kleptocracy is visible literally everywhere on all levels of society, its nauseating beyond any tolerance from me... Its impossible for me to accept it once I've experienced much better society. One of the reasons to never move back and not raise kids back there, even if whole family is far (which is not always a bad thing).
Also the fact that most online businesses allow late payment via invoice shipped with the goods feels crazy.
Depends on where you live and your consumer protection laws. In some places there are laws/rulings stating that no, you don't need to keep original packaging - especially for statutory minimum warranties.
If there are no laws it's up to the discretion of the seller.
In the EU, to exercise your mandatory 2 year warranty, you are not required to use original packaging by law, but manufacturers may require original packaging to honor extended warranties.
Is the system different in Switzerland? Or has this one retailer decided to take on being a arbitrator of warranty claims?
Many manufacturers will also offer warranty service, and it is up to you the customer which you want to use. Often manufacturers try to persuade you to contact them first because it costs them less than a refund would (typically retailers just refund rather than attempt a repair or replacement)
You can often claim warranty with the manufacturer if you want; depending on the item. It can be faster to do so, but you're not required.
Exactly the same as with Amazon here in the UK then. They have every retailer in this country absolutely beat on their approach to customer support - it's always no faff, easy, often instant refund, none of this waiting 60 minutes on the phone to speak with unhelpful CS for any of the major retailers. John Lewis were the only ones approaching Amazon in the quality of their customer service, but recently that has changed for much worse and they are as hostile as everyone else.
Consumer laws give a much longer window, and the retailer is responsible for resolving the issue [0], but any time I've had to try and get something replaced after the time limit it's involved going back to the original seller, hoping they still exist in the world of random TM company names. Never understood how Amazon gets away with this.
0: https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-do-i-do-...
"The retailer is responsible If what you’ve bought doesn’t satisfy any one of the three criteria outlined above, then the retailer that sold it to you is in breach of the Consumer Rights Act.
This means that your statutory consumer rights are against the retailer – the company that sold you the product – not the manufacturer."
I also had some other service where they advertised a particular price, and after filling in my personal details to order the service there was suddenly an extra mandatory charge which doubled the total price. wtf?! This was 100% illegal. I stopped as that was too much for me and they even had the guys to call me out of bed in the weekend to try and sell me their stupid stuff. I gave an unfiltered version of my opinion on that.
Logitech actually ended up sending me two keyboards. First they sent me the same model but with a different layout (but still usable) and when I complained about the layout they sent me a more expensive model with the expected layout. No returns, few questions asked. Excellent RMA experience but that being said their mechanical keyboards AFAIK all have some sort of chronic issue and just aren't worth the price.
Anker didn't ask me to return the earphones but refunded only 1/3 of what I paid (6m remaining in a 18m warranty). Mixed feelings about it though the experience was positive. On general I expect things to last a lot more than the warranted period. Anyway I still have the earphones and they still work (with reduced functionality) so let's say that I remained with a residual + the refunded amount.
I bet somebody kept that GPU, fixed it, and flipped it.
Especially with components like mainboards or GPUs this could be awkward, because turn-around times were often weeks or even months. We usually just replaced them without too much fuss, and then a month later we were sent back a repaired spare part that could perhaps maybe be used for a repair later. We generally accepted this as a "cost of business", but never seemed quite right to me.
While turnarounds on laptops were usually fairly decent, they could also be weeks, and replacing a €800 laptop on which we made €50 profit was kind of a non-starter. This also included stupid stuff like broken memory modules, or a broken hinge cover. The only way we could get reimbursed at all was by sending the entire laptop to them and hope it didn't take them 2 weeks to spend 5 minutes replacing a broken RAM module or something silly like that.
My point in all of this being: it's not necessarily the store's fault.
2nd biggest shows reliability, for instance iphone 12 has 99%
https://www.czc.cz/apple-iphone-12-128gb-green/301129/produk...
the biggest shop does inverse how many (1%) used warranty
https://m.alza.cz/iphone-12-64gb-cerna-d6216436.htm
this is worth checking before buying something because 97% reliability is for instance extremely bad compared to 99%, you are 3 times more likely to get faulty piece
there is also monopolistic price comparison website heureka.cz where you can check price history years back, compare all shops and set price tracking with notification covering pretty much all online shops
I still buy there because I quite like the challenge of repairing the things that don't work, and prices there are typically half of what things cost on Amazon.
I wish we had something like Digitec/Galaxus in Czechia. Mironet is probably the closest, but their product range is limited and they're still not quite there.
(It doesn't hurt that they also very often have close to the lowest price in Switzerland, or only a few CHF more than the absolute lowest, which often made it worth it for me just to have "most of my orders in one place" and know that I will have a good RMA experience if it comes to that.)
Also the quality of service vs price makes it a very appealing market but very hard to penetrate. This is why international players have always had issues to do so. Swiss customers care more about quality than price.
On Galaxus you can decide to chose slow delivery so you will not necessarly receive your product the next day. But for the same price: https://basic-tutorials.com/news/galaxus-and-digitec-now-del...
Edit: added link
But if they're items that would normally ship in 1-2 days, then it will provide a credits option if you have an Amazon Day (day of the week for combined deliveries) selected and that Amazon Day is at least 3 days in the future. It will also sometimes instead show a "no-rush shipping" option that is usually something like 5-7 days out, with credits.
I'm not going to lie, I almost always select it (even constantly changing my Amazon Day to be at least 3 days out from today), and I'm pretty sure I make back my Prime membership fee and then some. The credits are usually $1.50-$4.50 per shipment, expire after 3 months, and can only be used for digital purchases like Kindle and videos.
The culture of returns in all of the EU, too, is very different than the US.
In the US, there is no such law, though many retailers do it anyway. Some states, however, have implemented such laws, but it's not nationwide.
in the EU, you can return things after using them, no problem
Your top comment implied that it's a norm in the EU. It is not. It's very much retailer-specific.
> When can your customer withdraw from the contract?
If you have given all the necessary information about the right to withdraw, your customer has 14 days to withdraw from the contract - without any penalty and without having to give any reason:
For goods – this means 14 days after delivery
For services – this means 14 days after the contract was concluded
You must reimburse the money received from your customer (or cancel their payment) within 14 days of being notified they are withdrawing.
You may withhold this reimbursement until you have received the goods back from the customer, or at least received evidence they have actually sent them.
> Who pays what?
The Customer pays the cost of returning the goods (unless you failed to inform them of this in advance — in which case you will be liable for these costs).
Darty.com says that you can only return an item if it can be resold as new. Basically, you may only open it to inspect it. If there are signs of use, you won't get the full refund.
Other retailers, like Amazon, may not care about this and refund fully no questions asked. But in my experience, Amazon is pretty unique in doing this.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
>If you bought a product or a service online or outside of a shop (by telephone, mail order, from a door-to-door salesperson), you also have the right to cancel and return your order within 14 days, for any reason and without a justification.
In my experience, all retailers (have not tried in France, though) follow this law.
Unfortunately, I only have French references. The actual French law is at [0]. It says that the buyer is on the hook for any depreciation resulting from handling, apart from what is necessary to determine the characteristics and good working condition of the goods. So opening the vacuum box to see that it's not missing a part or something is fine. Vacuuming your house for 2 weeks is probably not. "Determine the characteristics" is ambiguous to me, so it's not clear where the line is.
For example, Zalando, an online clothes retailer, will accept returns for garments that have been "tried on" but not "worn" [1].
LDLC, an online electronics retailer, will accept returns for items in "original condition and packaging". I expect that if I buy a mouse, use it for a week and there are marks on the pads, they won't accept the return. [2]
[0] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...
[1] https://www.zalando.fr/aide/Retour-and-Remboursement/Conditi...
I purchased a Chinese brand scooter from a US-based dealer.
Their customer service was awful. They had a phone number that changed often and didn't work, and lied about their intent to honor warranty claims. It was broken for 4 months. In the end, they decided to cancel my warranty and refuse any further assistance because I dared to ask for a functional product.
I suggest no one ever buy a Kaabo scooter from any of the 3 major dealers in the US.
Kaabo itself is even worse providing no support to customers at all.
It could be a small claims court matter if they were in the same state.
It's cheaper to write-off the matter as a learning experience.
Voro Motors. They're a fly-by-night operation like the other Kaabo dealers I found in the US. Ship from China and expect no support or warranty.
Also, no e-scooter shops will touch Kaabos because they're not designed for repair and parts are difficult to source. The wiring inside looks like spaghetti with random colors that don't match their wiring diagram and wires that go nowhere. In addition, the early model forks would break spontaneously due to manufacturing defects that lead to a number of grotesque injuries and perhaps a death or two.
PS: BBB is itself a widely-held misconception and fraud, perhaps the inverse of Yelp. It's mostly a feel good badge businesses pay for. Any business can join it and they have little incentive to police their "members" because, like binding arbitration, the "members" are the customers, not retailer's customers.
Totally does.
> If you bought a product or a service online or outside of a shop (by telephone, mail order, from a door-to-door salesperson), you also have the right to cancel and return your order within 14 days, for any reason and without a justification.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
I guess it's one more reason to always buy online!
Price comparison sites are fine if I know exactly the item I want, less so if I just have an idea of the category.
It's not that I buy everything there. But it is my default option.
So you don't see people to go Jumbo (home depot equivalent) buy a tool and return it a week later after the job is done to get a full refund.
In fact even digitec/galaxus will charge you a 10% restocking fee if you opened the item and it isn't not defective in anyway.
I am curious, how is it different?
Here in the US, I have met seen whole spectrum where some people will never return anything even if it is obviously defective. And others who will return almost perfect items for tiny issues or for not meeting their expectations.
I am not sure how I would define the US return culture.
If you open Amazon from Switzerland and search for anything at all, you do get tons of products that seem nice & at a reasonable price, but click on any of them and it will say that the vendor doesn't ship to Switzerland. And this is when you set your location to Switzerland! There's no way to filter for products that ship there, Amazon simply doesn't bother.
This is why e commerce stores like Galaxus & Digitec (the tech-products twin of Galaxus) were even capable of getting so large in Switzerland, while in other countries any competition was swept away by Amazon.
There are some exceptions to this, e.g. Zalando, a clothes retailer, does deliver into Switzerland... I know that they have large logistics centers in Switzerland and basically send their products b2b, maybe that doesn't pay off for Amazon? I don't know.
8% doesn't matter that much, you'll see bigger differences than that for the same item between different retailers within Switzerland. A lot of people here don't shop around and aren't that price sensitive.
Duty is more relevant to food products. Meat is the big one. If you like meat, it's very profitable to take your whole family on a trip to a German supermarket across the border, since prices are ridiculous in CH and the meat is low quality - particularly the beef, which is from "dual purpose" cows, where "dual purpose" is like 95% milk cows.
So while it seems like a big step forwards (great!), it's still not going to tell you if a particular item from a brand is a big lemon. And in my experience, that's often what happens when a well-known brand starts putting out a few "budget" items. (Happened to me recently on a blender that burned out on first use, and going back to search the user reviews, it seems to be a notorious problem for that specific model of blender, but not the brand overall.)
Would be amazing if Amazon could display per-product stats on returns, at least for items with >10,000 total sales.
(In contrast, warranties usually/always seem to be handled directly through the manufacturer in the US at least, so Amazon wouldn't even have that data.)
Let me help you with that. Finland’s largest online retailer has had it for years, example: https://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/645007/Sony-WH-1000X...
One more observation:
If you look at the smartphone scores, you'll see that Apple warranty rates are WAY below other brands. I assume the reason for this is that for Apple you don't have to go through the retailer you bought it to have it fixed under warranty. For Samsung et al. there's little option to have your phone or tablet fixed without reaching out to the place you bought it.
I don't know the situation in Switzerland, but in the EU, the manufacturer warranty (whether from Apple or Samsung) is usually only 1 year. EU consumer law mandates a 2-year minimum warranty, so after the first year, you have to go through the store.
I then went to an unauthorized repair shop and they replaced my cracked screen with an unauthorized replacement part that only had 2 finger multi-touch (without telling me of course).
I don't personally own Apple devices, but from people close to me I know first hand that Apple's service is usually better than my experience two years ago.
The manufacturers warranty is up to them and is not mandatory.
I've had my personal phones repaired a handful of times in recent years (screens). All Samsung. I have never even considered taking them back to the place I bought them. I have always gone to whatever repair shop is local.
Their UI is so much ahead any e-commerce website I ever seen.
I was always surprised that the company didn’t do that, as they definitely lost alot of money to shrink and exceptions for high fail devices. At one point the company self-funded warranties, so a lemon had to kill profitability.
Go here, randomly chosen
https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/product/yamaha-rx-v4a-52-channe...
And then scroll down and click warranty and then click "Detailed view", it says
> How often does a product of this brand in the «AV Receiver» category have a defect within the first 24 months?
This doesn't mean what the title says, right? I'm not a native english speaker, but I hope my reading skill is not that bad. I read it like: Yamaha return scores in "AV Reciever". If Yamaha had 100 product in "AV Reciever", it doesn't say almost nothing to me regarding the Yamaha RX-V4A I'm seeing. It could be that all 3% (example number) defect are Yamaha RX-V4A, or completely 3 (assuming Yamaha has 100 different products) different products.
It doesn't says how often the product I'm seeing is returned. But A product of the brand BBBB in the category XXXX is returned.
I don't know, it is still a useful metric nonetheless. But it is still a misleading title.
Galaxus is great in terms of range and delivery time. They have local stores in city centers where you can pick up items to get them even quicker and avoid the packaging associated with shipping.
However, their return policy is terrible. If you return something with an opened box, there is a 10% return tax. https://www.galaxus.ch/en/wiki/560
Presumably it is much harder to sell now. If you didn’t want it, why buy it in the first place?
Seems like a subset of the fake-review problem. Except with money exchanged, tangible costs to the retailer and more documentation.
Most fraudulent activity isn't attacking competitors, as it's prohibitively expensive, but instead propping up their own reputation. i.e. Amazon's fake reviews are mostly five-stars.
Very inexpensive. Especially when expensive products are involved + few competitors. The ROI is massively good.
I just looked up a product I've had problems with - Netatmo Presence outdoor security cameras - and found they're rock bottom of the in-warranty returns list: https://www.galaxus.ch/en/s1/product/netatmo-presence-1920-x...
Some return rate data is currently figured into "Amazon's Choice" labeling - for example, low return rate on an established product, more likely to be labeled Amazon's Choice.
But I'd like to see if Amazon has the guts to just make it all public.
EDIT: I stand corrected, you can leave public feedback on the seller's page (it's a bit hard to get there, you have to go through the sold product). That being said, refunding the non-delivered item doesn't seem to be possible without contacting support.
But people also buy tons of brand-name stuff on Amazon, where this can't happen. I absolutely want to know the return rate for name-brand stuff.
--
[0] Time between a customer's purchase and re-purchase of a product.
[1] Percent of original buyers that buy again.
I can't create account, simply nothing happens when I enter my email address and click "Next" or hit Enter key and so on and such.
As Firefox Relay is not available in my country I was hoping to try your service.
I have few more questions about Owlmail so I would appreciate if you could let me know if there is a more appropriate channel for asking those.
If I'm mistaken or you'd rather not engage like this - apologies!
Amazon has little traction in Switzerland still.
Swiss people like to support local businesses, hurray!
How does one verify they are true and not just another marketing trick.
But since returns are handled by Galaxus themselves, these numbers can’t be easily fudged. You’d have to actually buy the product and return it to negatively affect these scores.
But then again, they only ship to Switzerland, no? So what do they gain from exposing the site on HN?