Transcend's lifetime warranty confuses dealers

The lifetime warranty that is offered on Transcend products is confusing
customers and dealers. All Transcend products come with a standard warranty
support for lifetime, but it is unclear what this lifetime constitutes. Is it
the lifetime of the product, the alliance between the dealer and the vendor or
that of the customer's lifetime? Dealers feel that the concept of lifetime
warranty is not clearly mentioned and this is causing problems.

Sanath Jain of Acer Cybertech in Nagpur said, “According to the vendor, the
life of a flash-based product is three years and after that, the life of the
product expires. In the IT industry, a product's life cycle is short because
newer upgrades are available in a couple of years. When a product comes with a
lifetime warranty, a customer thinks that whenever a product fails, it should be
repaired or replaced free of cost. This creates mistrust and conflict between
the dealer and the customer.”

Another dealer, Suhas Lanke of Hi-Tech Computers agreeing with Jain said, “I
think we must be very clear as to what lifetime warranty is. If I am selling a
pen drive, the company says that life of the product is 2,000 insertions.
However, who is going to count the number of insertions?” According to Lanke, it
is necessary to clearly mention the number of years as warranty period and not
lifetime warranty.

Replacement of faulty Transcend products is also a problem. Sometimes the
serial number of the product gets rubbed off. Distributors, who are responsible
for offering replace­ments, refuse to accept that the product has been purchased
from them and therefore do not give a replacement. “Some even go to the extent
of telling us that it has been procured through the gray channel and not via the
proper channel,” Lanke added.

Dushyant Mehta of Mediaman Group, one of the national distributors for
Transcend said, “If the product has been bought from a genuine channel then we
will abide by the warranty offered by Transcend. Problem starts when the gray
operators enter and say that their profit margins are very low and cannot afford
to give a lifetime warranty.”

Ravish Khapra