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Finnish IT Retailer Reveals Most Returned Products
jones_supa writes: The largest computer gear retailer in Finland, Verkkokauppa.com, has unveiled top 20 lists of most returned and most serviced equipment in 2015 (Google translation). To offer an alternative to Black Friday, the company is going with a theme called "Sustainable Christmas". They want to guide shoppers to make good choices, as product returns always create extra burden for the distribution chain. Is there anything that catches your eye in the lists, or something else that you would like to warn about?
The list is no surprise. Their top returns can be classified into 3 categories:
1) Tablet cases/covers. Oftentimes they explicitly claim to fit the iPads, and also other 10.1/7" tablets, but end up too loose and the tablet slips out, and of course the straps aren't adjustable. Few people bring their tablet into the store to check, and it's likely a present and still in a box.
2) Devices which utilize radio waves. Interference by walls/furniture, and other devices, cause reception to vary widely. The overloaded 2.4GHz spectrum is making this gradually worse. For wireless audio, people have little tolerance for the signal cutting out. Remember 'antennagate'? A poor wifi antenna can make a tablet (or unlocked phone) hard to use.
3) Sticks of RAM. I was kinda surprised by this, although thinking back to how many unused sticks of RAM I own that my mobos just won't work with for various reasons, it shouldn't be too surprising. Some people likely get SODIMMs instead of DIMMs and vice versa, or the wrong speed, or the wrong DDR tech.
In brick and mortar, top electronics returns are phone chargers with the wrong plug (Lightning instead of micro-usb or vice versa), and $5 headphones whose wires snap after bending them twice. Tablets are next, followed by Wifi speakers. God, the tablets; the cheap ones are cheap enough to be unusable, but are expensive enough to warrant returning, so the return rate is ~75% on some of them. Printers were very frequently returned because the manufacturer tried to save 50cents by not including a USB-B cable; customers would complain it had no cable, and for some reason they don't have a dozen laying around their house like I do. Only including a black ink cartridge and no color (or vice versa) was another frequently given reason. If people weren't able to rip the packaging open and try it on, I imagine many smartphone cases would be returned; apparently noone knows what phone they have, and have to try to put the case on in order to figure out if it'll fit. At best, they know they have an iPhone, or 'a Samsung', but most often, it's e.g. 'a Verizon'. Most amusing return award: an HDMI cable returned for 'not working with a 3d signal' despite the packaging explicitly saying it did. Surprisingly, (small) TVs were almost never returned, I guess they really do encourage passivity.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Color not as expected.
Ordered white/gold dress, received blue/back one...
It's a bit like a verkkokauppa.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Since the beginning of the Internet, English has become the fastest growing human language on Earth, ever.
There are now many times more speakers of English as a second language-- ESL speakers-- as there are those native born to speaking English. Even more to the point, there are more business and technical exchanges between ESL speakers than there are similar exchanges where all parties are native English speakers. Like it or not, English became today's "Lingua Franca" about a decade ago. Please try to keep up :-)
English is better suited to this role than any other native language. It is itself a mongrel language where most core concepts have multiple synonyms drawn from different ancient roots. And the pathway to adding new concepts from foreign languages remains wide open. "Namaste", the use of "fail" in constructions such as "he fails it", "samizdat" distributions, and hundreds more words absorbed from foreign root languages have changed English so much that a Professor of English of a hundred years ago would have difficulty understanding its daily use on blogs and forums, and would have vast difficulty in making his comments intelligible to others without first studying the new English.
English rules, but not because it is inherently better for global communications than any other language. English rules because it is so fantastically flexible that you can totally mangle all its rules of syntax and bring in any number of foreign words and still deliver a semantically valid message. English rules because its "rules" carry no more weight than mere suggestions. So you can mangle it in all kinds of ways, and still deliver something meaningful.
Will