Products > Test Equipment
Keysight officially lost the plot - don't buy if you're a hobbyist
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madires:

--- Quote from: xrunner on December 12, 2021, 12:19:27 pm ---
--- Quote ---4 (j) Products are intended for professional and industrial use only, and
are not suitable for consumer or household use, and Customer
represents and warrants that it is not acquiring Products for such
uses. Consumer or household use, or use outside of the Specification
for the Product, will nullify Sections 2(a), (b) and (e), 4(a) and (b), 5(b)
and 6 of these Terms and void the warranty terms set out, or
incorporated in, Section 3.

--- End quote ---

They don't claim you cannot buy something, but that it will void term and warranties if you are a consumer / household user.

--- End quote ---

If they sell directly to a consumer that paragraph is void in the EU. The implied warranty can't be denied.
TwistedTransistor:

--- Quote from: RBBVNL9 on December 12, 2021, 12:43:14 pm ---
--- Quote ---4 (j) Products are intended for professional and industrial use only, and are not suitable for consumer or household use, and Customer represents and warrants that it is not acquiring Products for such uses.
--- End quote ---

So, if in its own marketing material Keysight promotes their instruments to be used by "Engineers working on workbenches set up in garages, basements, home offices, sheds [...]." they must legalistically mean that such places are not part of a household or for consumers ?!?

--- End quote ---
You could make a good legal argument that a professional/licensed/chartered engineer purchasing an oscilloscope for his own educational, professional developmental use at his home is very much a "professional use case". There is nothing in the policy above that explicitly limits sale to businesses only. And as you point out even their own marketing copy backs this view up.

It seems to me that this is a stupid policy, ill-considered, badly written and randomly enforced. I cannot see how this would be held up in court and it is highly likely that a court would take a dim view of these business practices.

But aside from all the legal stuff, why would anyone want to deal with a company that behaves like this? Whether legal or not, the way they have gone about this is all wrong and leaves them looking like a bunch of assholes. It leaves a sour taste in the mouth and I wonder what stunts they might try to pull in the future. I've got a project coming up at work next year where I will need to purchase a new spectrum analyzer. There's no way I would consider a Keysight after this debacle. Will my refusal to recommend purchase of Keysight products make any difference to their bottom line? Probably not, but that's besides the point. I won't deal with Keysight because they're assholes.

One last point to make is that this seems to, officially anyway, be a worldwide policy and is not limited to UK or Europe as Dave (eevblog) and other have recently claimed. If you're not facing these problems from your local Keysight organisation then lucky you, but you'd be silly to count on that remaining the case given the facts available in this thread.

Fflint:
Cheap LLC is not an option in EU. Start one and (depending on country) you'll have compulsory health/pension/disability insurance payments of few hundred EUR to make every month. In addition to full business accounting and reporting requirements. I used to have a UK Ltd Company, but after brexit that rapidly became useless outside the UK.

At least here in Poland we have this law that allows anyone to run a miniature business (under 216EUR revenue a month) without any kind of registration. Any person can say they are running "an unregistered business" and no one has a right to treat them any differently. This is a fairly new law that came into effect in 2019or 2020 so not many people know it. Also, as Poland is a member of EU said person running "an unregistered businesses" lawfully has to be treated as any other legitimate business in any EU country.

This, however has its disadvantages too. The EU laws protect non-business customers more than business users. For example shops selling to non-business customers are forced to provide 2 years of warranty (vs 1 year for businesses). They have to accept no questions asked returns in 14 days for remote sales etc. Also there is sellers obligation for "the item sold to be fit for purpose" in accordance with its description or implied customer expectation.

It is much better to make your hobby purchases in personal capacity because of that.

With regards to customer service the seller is required to provide that if not providing it would cause that you can't obtain full use of the device. So if you are in Europe and you need Keisight customer service to obtain some software, bug fixes, or manuals I would contact the seller to obtain it (unless the seller is also a private person).

If the seller is a private person perhaps he or she can supply you with original purchase information and you can get in touch with the original seller. No doubt you'll need proof of purchase.

Another curiosity is that they are asking for a VAT id. In EU you may have a business that is not VAT registered. Most businesses are, but you are only required to be VAT registered above a certain (rather low) annual revenue threshold (something like few 10k EUR I believe ).

So not only they are declining customer service to individuals. They also declining it to any small businesses that is not VAT registered. Bonkers.
rsjsouza:

--- Quote from: BrokenYugo on December 12, 2021, 01:04:24 am ---This kind of plays into my theory that golden age of e-commerce is dead.
--- End quote ---
I wouldn't go that far, even if you had appended your sentence with the B2B word there. Not only Keysight is a drop in the ocean (#1305 in Forbes 2000) but, looking at the record profits seen by the e-commerce industry in the past two years, it is growing stronger than ever (one of the largest wealth transfers in history, some say). What I agree is that the golden era of direct manufacturing selling/supporting hobbyists might be coming to an end, but IIRC this was only running for the past 10~12 years window.


--- Quote from: BrokenYugo on December 12, 2021, 01:04:24 am ---The internet opened up a lot of industrial stuff to the public, and now they're all probably remembering why they didn't do that historically. If you ignore how it pisses off some people who do put in big orders, as shown in this thread, i.e. typical corporate shortsightedness, it's probably not terribly profitable to deal with the public between the volume and privileges granted to consumers under law that a certain percentage are sure to abuse.
--- End quote ---
I agree with that - historically the dealers/traders were responsible for all this hassle and this direct sales model from the manufacturer might dry up. If anything, we can keep buying products from Keysight but via Farnell, Mouser, Digikey, etc., and they would keep handling warranties, RMAs, RMRs, etc.


--- Quote from: BrokenYugo on December 12, 2021, 01:04:24 am ---Going forward a cheap LLC is probably the best solution, small customers aren't going to convince giant corporations to do anything, so you have to play by their asinine rules.

--- End quote ---
That is indeed the sound strategy, although the rules vary greatly from country to country - in US is not terribly hard, but in Brasil it can become quite cumbersome...
hpw:

Have a 7k US gear, purchased by Batronix, as they deal with issues & warranty, but they prefer simple even not to answer to questions.

So one day I am about of a 20G/s scope... hard to tell about good gear, as Siglent even issues (Sigelnt engineer even told to send back while it is not working as on data sheet) on several gear as FW & simple promised data sheet functions to wait for month, Rigol same ... in other words as soon you payed, you will see only the nice back..

In other words, service gets an other meaning  :palm:

Hp

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