Weekly Sponsorship Thread - Feb 17th 2022

[JonoT]

Hey everyone!

This is our first official thread for our incredible fans to raise concerns, issues, or praise our sponsors.  It will be open for about one week and then closed, with a new one created in its place. The reason why we want to do it this way is to help prevent the thread from getting too long since we don't want to be 30-40 pages deep trying to find one single piece of feedback.
 

What kind of feedback we're looking for:

Customer Service Issues

News on bad business practices 

Poor product quality

 

We want to keep this thread as productive as possible! So let's make sure we're not getting off track. 

Business Team Members:

@SeanLMG
@GeoffLMG
@BellLMG

@CPotter
@JonoT
 

[adarw]

you wrote 2020... i mean it does still feel like 2020, but were in 2022  

[JonoT]

12 minutes ago, adarw said:

you wrote 2020... i mean it does still feel like 2020, but were in 2022  

Good catch!

[GhostRoadieBL]

Ting Mobile - back in 2018 they wrote about wanting to break into the Canadian telecomm market but claiming CRTC blockages. There are still no MNVOs in Canada and it appears 3 years later when the CRTC cracked the door open a bit Ting was nowhere to be found lobbying for more. Now it appears they've fully dropped Canada as a potential market.

They do however have a good price for US based (especially compared to Canadian carriers) so they are at least doing well in one market.

 

Storyblocks - solid company, very customer first which is awesome. Their contributor payouts are criminally low compared to every other stock asset website (even adobe pays more than them)

https://www.mystockphoto.org/storyblocks-cuts-contributor-royalties/

[MrMcMuffinJr]

Vessi. Oh Vessi......................Great Shoes! Shady logistics practices....Here is my experience.

I bought a pair of Vessi Men's Everyday Moves on Oct 29th of last year. If memory serves, they were shipped out about a week later. Now I say the word "shipped" as a courtesy as calling it that would be the equivalent to giving a bread crumb to a homeless man but I digress. Vessi, according to their website have 3 warehouses. Two in the states, including one that is literally a 3h drive from my house, and Hong Kong. guess where they decided to ship my shoes from...Hong Kong. According to fedex tracking, poor FedEx hadn't gotten the box for about a week so I contacted Vessi who told me to wait. another couple of days went by. (I have chat logs if ya'll are interested) Now Vessi is telling me my shoes are "lost." Remember that word as it will be important soon. I naturally ask for them to re-ship the shoes so I can actually get what I paid for. Here's the thing...Since apparently they were lost I was under the impression that they sent a new and different pair. Eventually I Received my shoes, but there was something interesting about the label. There was another label under it. Guess which tracking number was on it...Correct! the original supposedly "lost" one. Here's the impression that they gave me. It might seem extreme but tell me it doesn't make sense. Vessi randomly set aside my shoes in a "lost" pile and conveniently unlost them after I complained instead of just sending them out in the first place. I honestly could have crawled on all fours to the Chicago warehouse in the time it took Vessi to give me my shoes. This all might sound super silly to you but it was incredibly frustrating since those shoes aren't cheap.

Thanks.

[thesilentmajority]

i have nothing but praise for Secret Lab having purchased a titan chair a year ago i noticed that 4 stitches on the seam of the zipper at the rear of the lumbar support Knob were ripped, not a major issue i agree but i contacted customer services an provided photos and without any qualms they sent me a whole new back of the chair.

I do however have an ongoing issue with Oneplus and their returns/repair service here in the UK as i am currently awaiting the return of my oneplus 6 having sent it off for a replacement battery 10 days ago. apparently they have no stock and cannot give me a date when new stock will be arriving. having already paid the quotation which seems to come from a third party service provider that sent the Quotation by snail mail and do not give updates along the process. After firstly having to contact customer services at oneplus because initially my phone was showing on the returns tracking service as not received even though the carriers tracking portal had shown the item was delivered 2 days prior they eventually tracked the item as delivered and now they cant say when stock is arriving. shockingly poor service imo.

[thesilentmajority]

i must also mention TeamGroup as they had no issue replacing my T-Force Z440 2TB NVMe ssd after it gave up the ghost after 18 months of light use. i had a replacement delivered within about 10 days after sending the product back to Taiwan. i cant speak for the failure rate of the product but their customer service was surprisingly efficient.

 

[mynameGeoff]

4 hours ago, thesilentmajority said:

i have nothing but praise for Secret Lab having purchased a titan chair a year ago i noticed that 4 stitches on the seam of the zipper at the rear of the lumbar support Knob were ripped, not a major issue i agree but i contacted customer services an provided photos and without any qualms they sent me a whole new back of the chair.

I do however have an ongoing issue with Oneplus and their returns/repair service here in the UK as i am currently awaiting the return of my oneplus 6 having sent it off for a replacement battery 10 days ago. apparently they have no stock and cannot give me a date when new stock will be arriving. having already paid the quotation which seems to come from a third party service provider that sent the Quotation by snail mail and do not give updates along the process. After firstly having to contact customer services at oneplus because initially my phone was showing on the returns tracking service as not received even though the carriers tracking portal had shown the item was delivered 2 days prior they eventually tracked the item as delivered and now they cant say when stock is arriving. shockingly poor service imo.

Awesome to hear your positive experience with Secretlab. They've also been solid to work with business-wise, hopefully we can work together with them on bigger projects in the future.

 

We've haven't worked with OnePlus on a sponsored project since 2019 iirc but we'll bring up their customer support issues if talks start opening up again and get a better idea on what's going on.

 

Thanks again for your feedback

[GeekPower0]

I’ve tried signing up for Privacy a while back after hearing about it through an LTT spot. Unfortunately, after registering I was told my account was under review. After inquiring if there was additional info needed, I was told that upon review my account was being deactivated. The same email said they would give no explanation for why this was the case. The support experience behind this was terrible, as I was unable to provide or gather any information regarding this.

[swabfu]

On 2/19/2022 at 10:56 PM, GeekPower0 said:

I’ve tried signing up for Privacy a while back after hearing about it through an LTT spot. Unfortunately, after registering I was told my account was under review. After inquiring if there was additional info needed, I was told that upon review my account was being deactivated. The same email said they would give no explanation for why this was the case. The support experience behind this was terrible, as I was unable to provide or gather any information regarding this.

Privacy.com seems like a really cool service but it's unfortunately limited to the US, meaning us European customers can't use it and I can't find a decent alternative. Not a reason to drop the sponsor, but maybe the business team could inquire as to why there's no European service/when it could be expected? Thanks.

[Berk70]

I think this is a great thread to gather information from people. Thanks.

 

But I would like to mention that espacially about sponsors where you are from matters. On very big brands like msi asus etc these are big companies that reach most of the world but depending on the country or even certain warranty center the service you get might be different. Even on amazon.com I am from Turkey and amazon.com.tr does not have long reviews on bought products and it does not allow picture reviews for some reason. These bg companies differ from region to region so much I suggest  @JonoT should also look for location.

 

I have had bad experiences with apple, msi, asus, western digital, intel, samsung, volkswagen etc. but most was because of my specific country's shitty service. It is still their responsibility I do not deny they need to do better everywhere but you get what I am saying.

 

Lastly just last month I has intel igpu and msi motherboard issue that was solved with a bios update but it took some time and effort because they were so lazy toupdate after selling a product  https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/11400-igpu-shows-green-red-and-white-dots-all-over-decoded-video/m-p/1350839#M104654

[obnoxiousmedic]

I like your sponsors mostly because you guys try your best to be transparent on why you've dropped sponsors in the past and ish.  

So far, PIA has been a solid buy. Lately, a lot more sites appear to be having a VPN detection so the just outright don't work. I've tried switching servers to no avail. It's okay though.  

I'm trying to get more info on YubiKey (or any other hardware password service).