Todd just replied to me, and I say great support offering refund on the failed units.
I've bought $100s of stuff from them so in the end they honored their side of this fiasco.
They've offered a refund in the failed units, so I hope they get the same from their suppliers since they're putting themselves on the block for this;
/BM (Fran)
Ok.. offered a refund of the failed units.. so did you have to ship them back? If so, who paid to ship them back? who paid to ship them to you in the first place?
I my case I have no plans to even use these until 2017 so I asked Todd if these are from the same batch, and if so would he warranty them that year if I keep them or should I send them back.. I explained that i didn't care about 1 or 2 failures but 20-50% was not going to work. So...now assuming they are the same batch that you are having high fail rates on.. His response was that it would be best if I send them back and buy when I actually needed them.. So that is OK.. EXCEPT he wants me to pay shipping back to him.. because that is his policy. So that means I would be paying $40 in just round trip shipping for $90 worth of a defective batch of product that I never even took out of the box but was found to have a very high defect rate. I would not say that is such a great deal from a vendor.
I also said I will pay the shipping back if he refunds the original shipping charges.. I have not heard back from him yet but it has only been a few hours.. Somehow I am sure it will get worked out..I would be happy if he just replaced them with known good product and I would just toss these.. I would rather have good strobes than nothing at all for the $40.
With that said.
Still don't know if they are from the bad batch.. but I assume they are...
In all honesty, a good vendor would investigate and if the fail rates where that high, they would recall the product and or refund and tell you to dispose of them. Being a retailer, he takes that chance with the product he sells. We all should have expectations that a vendor has vetted what they sells.. and should that not work out, stand behind mass defects including the cost to get them back if he needs to do that. I also hope he gets the return credit from his vendor, but again, as a retailer it is his responsibility to deal with that.
I know when I made DMX cards for the laser industry and sold them for a very small margin, I had an issue where someone in England got two cards that tested good here but for some reason had the wrong resistor packs in them. Those packs came out of a bag that came straight from a US vendor that had somehow put two different ones in the same bag... and the numbers were only one off. Our testing didn't show the particular issue they were having, but I paid FedEx international 2 day air to get them back and send him new ones. Yes.. lost my ass on that product for months because of those parts.. but I made it right by every single customer.. It wasn't the customer's fault and it wasn't just warranty failure. It was a manufacturing issue.. just like the strobes...
Perhaps I just have high expectations of vendors since I was once one myself.