I should clarify the 6 weeks mentioned on the website. That is using normal air mail. Postal delivery in China is horrendous. Using a courier is much quicker. It is not the turn-around time with us, it is the shipping time.
In many cases, we have local repair agreements and do not require return to China at all. In other cases we will take to word of established sellers and simply replace an item on their say-so. Most established sellers will also keep some stock on hand and replace from their inventory and return to us in a batch. We also supply established sellers "Care Packages" of spares such as batteries, cables, chargers, again so they can quickly resolve minor problems.
While I can speak for no one else, I can say that we do all we can to keep actual returns to China to a minimum. After nearly a full year in business I have issued a total of 32 Returned Goods Authorizations, less than 3 a month. With well over 3,000 items shipped, this is about 1/10 of 1%. Many were for spy pens, which I have stopped selling.
In complete honesty, there has been an almost identical number of Repair Orders issued for local repairs, so the true rate is more like 2/10 or 1%, a figure that has been fairly constant since I first started offering mp3s and mp4s last October.
I understand that each warranty claim is a catastrophe to the person who made the sale and the buyer, and try to resolve it in the most timely manner. Keep in mind that stated policy has to cover the worst case situations, but is not always the entire story.
Linear Mode
March 2010
