We purchased a dehumidifier 4 months ago on Amazon. It has been working fine, however it had an EF code that disappeared after unplugging and re-plugging the device. We contacted Customer Service to find out what the code meant and were told that the device needed to be disassembled ( it came assembled) down to the circuit board to check for a lose wire and that we needed to do that ourselves. We refused. Then they offered a new unit once we paid $45 to ship to them. The unit is under a warranty that claims hassle free returns. I’m feeling “hassled”. OR we could leave a good review that praised their customer service and they would send a return address label. It is not clear if we would still be charged for return shipping. Is this a common practice? It feels shady to me.
Sounds like you are working with a third party seller vs Amazon?
It sounds shady to me as well. If you purchased this from a third party seller have you contacted Amazon about this?
Do you have emails from the seller that corroborate what you are saying? If so make sure you keep them and send them along to anyone/anyplace to prove what this seller is trying to do.
Thank you so much for replying! The seller only wants to correspond by text, but I have forwarded those to email for archiving. I do not still have the text with the link to disassemble the dehumidifier. They might send the link again, if I act as it I am considering that option. The dehumidifier is working just fine so we will not attempt to deal with this just now. All we wanted to know from the seller was what the code meant and we have not been successful in getting that.
By the way, the seller asked that we pay return shipping into a PayPal account to Tom@company name and then to take a photo and text it back to the requestor. I’m not sophisticated enough to know if this is typical. Not that we are considering doing that, it simply seems like a red flag. Does this seem like a typical request from a seller to you?
Thank you again for your earlier response. I am wary of being scammed.
I personally have never heard of paying return shipping the way you describe it. In addition, in my opinion offering, a return address label in return for a good review is shady.
Have you been able to find information on the company using search engines and various consumer sites? If you have please tell us what has been said about them.
First let me respond to Nicki54 that your reply went to my spam folder and I am just now discovering it. Sorry about that. Now to Bogarts_Falcon point: I have located lots of complaints about the company on Amazon’s site in the customer reviews with 1 star reviews and claiming that the product is junk. Several have made the discovery during the 30-day return period with Amazon. It’s not unusual for these reviews to include that any replacement sent from Amazon has also failed, sometimes within the 30 days, but often a few weeks after that.
For those who have attempted to reach the vendor customer service, many receive no response at all. Others have received the same text as I did. I learned that if you give the company a 1 rating, they will contact you and offer money in exchange for a 5 rating if it includes praising their customer service. You have to prove to them that you have changed the rating first.
Several people claimed that Amazon is aware of what is going on. Since we have not attempted that as yet, I cannot say.
I have copied one review that seems to pretty well capture the vendors customer service model:
“Hoo boy. I’ve dropped this review from 2 stars based on the product, now to 1 star to include customer service. After posting the 2-star review (which I stand by) I was contacted by customer service offering me either a new unit (no return required) or a $50 Amazon gift card and discount on a 70-pint dehumidifier to delete or change to 4/5 star… So I told them I would be happy for a replacement, would delete the review, but if the replacement had the same problem I would re-post the same review. Their response - which is quite telling in my opinion - was to up the bribe offer to $100 (on an original purchase value of $144), and start selling me a sob story about how the CS rep would lose their job, be unable to feed their kids, and probably die of covid if I didn’t change my review to 4-5 stars. Which would be unfortunate, except it’s clearly a script text since they’ve now sent the same begging email to me half a dozen times.”
I have to assume that my husband did not read these reviews before making the purchase. I think that he thought that the warranty would cover any problems. I’m not optimistic having read the 1 star reviews across several models from this vendor.