Unauthorized Sellers of Scubapro, Apeks and NO WARRANTY for you baby!

[zboss]

jonscubas once bubbled...
If you do end up buying them from the unauthorized guys, you end up spending an arm and a leg just to get regular maintenance work done, especially if they need to have parts changed.

While it IS true that the warranty is not valid (which may be some kind of issue the FTC should look into) it is NOT true that servicing is going to cost you... as a matter of fact parts are included (at least for my regulator) and you only pay for shipping and a $39 labor fee. So - over two years I will pay about $100 more to get my regulator serviced but I still saved about $150 above that buy purchasing from LP. They also assembled my gear and tested it before shipping to me.

 

[Genesis]

that the parts kit for a typical SP 2nd stage is about $10 and for a 1st its about $15!

"Arm and a leg"?! Who's are 'ya pulling over there?

 

[zboss]

snobeach once bubbled...
My LDS claims that the discount they can offer on any piece of equipment is predetermined by the manufacturer. They say this is to maintain a level playing field between authorized shops. Is this true? If so, how do some shops keep price differences (compared to online) more to a minimum than others?

Also, my last discussion with my LDS had him going on and on about some products purchased on-line being fraudulant. "Cheap copies with name brand labels". He described a reg he was recently asked to service, and the strange/alien parts he discovered within. I took this with a grain of salt. I suspect if this were true, it would be well documented here. Also, I assume the online shops still have to consider liability; thus, selling frauds would be an extreme risk for all involved. Comments???

I am sure that there really is dumping of grey market/mis-branded equipment out there, but I don't think that LeisurePro is one of the companies selling them... it is more likely the LDS. I have a friend that works at the Commerce Department in countervailance I will ask him what resources are available to track these grey market "Gucchi look-a-like" regs; I suspect that a lot of them would come from Taiwan, Malaysia, etc... just like fake Windows Operating System software, you can't always tell the difference they are such good fakes.

 

[Bob3]

Diveinn IS an authorized dealer of all the gear they sell (no gray market), the stuff you get from them is covered by factory warranty.
Had a very nice chat with the general manager in Las Vegas last week.

 

[raviepoo]

Do I have to send it to Spain for service?

 

[Bob3]

For warranty work, send Diveinn an email, they'll have DHL stop at your house & pick it up, no charge to you.
They may wind up just sending you a new one, the turnaround time is barely over a week.
Annual service, no sweat, just bring it in to a US reseller & don't say the words "online" or "internet". Just say you got it "out of town". (keeps attitude from being developed)
DiveInn will also do the annual service, right now you have to send it over, but It wouldn't suprise me if a US service outfit weren't set up soon.
The folks at Diveinn are divers, btw.

 

[Deepsix5]

Just food for thought but I wonder how many of the LDS's or other local shops would complain about purchasing on line while buying a ticket on a discount airline.

 

[Dr. Jay]

Heh...good point DeepSix. I'm sure they'd whine if you bought something from the other LDS down the street.

Here's what I did: :hidputer:

I got my regs from an LDS. I found an Eek-bay auction that said the item came with the warranty, and the LDS came very close to the price. Bottom line - I want my main life support device to come from someone I know and can trust. You're going to have to pay for the 1-year warranty service anyway (which can be around $50 not including parts) if you don't buy from the LDS. That can easily bring the online price up to equal a deal at a LDS.

Everything (well, almost everything) else I went to E-bay or Diveinn/Leisurepro for. If it breaks, I can't whine about it b/c I got a good price. Most of that stuff (the BC, fins, etc.) I can fix on my own.

So maybe try and take a deal you find online to your LDS and see if they can match it. Maybe they can come close?

 

[danw2002]

boy i hear you on this, but one thing you might keep in mind. i have in many cases found out that when you have long delays like this with a big manufacter, expes. when all they ended up doing is replaceing the compt. you can trace it to the LDS droping the ball and not picking it up again till you just about firebomb the place, and all the while them blaming the manufact. for the delay. in my expereance, the problems are local....but sometimes very hard to get to the bottom of it, unless the LDS will just be honest and addmit to the fact that they messed up in some way...fun eh....:bonk: :bonk:.....yea yea yea i'm awake now...

earl once bubbled...
Well, I recently had my thoughts on this matter swing quite a bit. I bought the majority of my gear through a LDS, and unfortunately knew much less than I know now, and ended up with a BCD, etc, when I think I should be using wings. Strike one. IOW, wasted gear == wasted money. Nonetheless, my story goes like this: I bought an Aeris Atmos Pro computer, console w/ compass, etc, new at my LDS for $450 or so (IIRC.) I then proceeded to put maybe 10 dives on it before the batteries died. I was kind of upset they died so quickly, but fine, whatever. Replacing the batteries was somewhere between $10 and $20, including having someone at the LDS do it for me.

Four dives later, in the middle of a dive at the local lake (max depth 50f), my computer started flickering and reading a depth of 350 odd feet. Glancing over at my buddy, I confirmed that I hadn't plummetted 300 feet since last looking at my computer After taking it in to the LDS, I was told I should just wait until it turned off, resetting it if necessary. This seemed more than a little odd, but I played along. The next morning, after the rest of my gear dried, I discovered condensation on the inside of the computer.

Back to the LDS. Yup, that's condensation. Nope, it's not supposed to condense inside your computer. First thing they looked at was the battery case, which was securely screwed down. Well, good thing this is in warranty. In to Aeris it went.

A month passed. I kept asking where my computer was. At Aeris.

Another month passed. No computer. Still at Aeris.

Finally, 11 weeks after my computer went to my LDS (and 11 weeks of the short Wisconsin dive season), I got my computer back. I was the one who had to bug the folks at the LDS and those morons at Aeris. It was about at the point where I was going to say I needed a computer or $450, and I didn't much care which.

Where, exactly, was the service? I mean, I paid a fairly large premium (about $150, or 30% of the purchase price) at the LDS over LeisurePro or DiveINN, and I've spent over $2500 in this store. After this, I'm pretty disillusioned; it certainly didn't help that *I* had to keep bugging the folks at the LDS to call Aeris and ask WTF they were doing with my computer -- building a new one by hand? As for Aeris, well, they are crap. They simply replaced the computer -- what else can you do when there is water in it. It was nice of them to sit on it for 10 weeks, though. I mean, this wasn't the middle of dive season or anything

So, the conclusion is threefold: never again will I own anything Aeris makes, I don't think that LDS will be getting much more business, and LeisurePro/DiveINN can sit on my gear just as well as an LDS -- and at just shy of three months for a simple replacement, it isn't as if one more stop getting mailed back to the manufacturer will cost much more time. And the service can't be any worse.

-earl-

 

[danw2002]

Well said Erich, also i would add, many dive stores are run by a Diver as the owner, and while there is nothing wrong with this, if he/she learns good sound business practices and impliments them, many of them do not become a true business person and wonder why they are always just barely making it. No true customer service, poor inventory control, bad product mix, poor location, high employee turnover though lack of people skills and/or poor motivation techniques, there are many more.
This is the case with any Hobbie type pursuit that can grow into a business, after a certain point it needs to become a business or it dies..NOW NOTE there are exceptions to this, but this is what I have observed in my neck of the Woods....and from personal experiance....:bonk: :bonk:.....man i got to stop hitting myself...:bonk: ouch.....

erichK once bubbled...
Having re-certified come into diving in three different eras--the late sixties, the early eighties and again last year, and like some previous posters, also having some familiarity with such other sports as cycling, as well as such high tech hobbies as astronomy and photography gives me a bit of a perspective on this discussion.

First of all, divers are loaded down with ---likely too---many items of dive equipment Then there is a consistent pressure from certifying agencies, especially PADI, to make more and more equipment complulsory. Where once a reg, pressure guage, depth guage and a compass where pretty well all that was needed, enormously expensive BC's, seldom used auxillary regs, andf countless little doodads to attach and attach to these seem to have become the norm. Diver who seldom venture much below 40 or 50 feet are equipped with redundant guages to back up computers, small knives and flights to back up bigger ones,etc. This is not to mention safety sausages and other emergency items. Diving, like cycling or astronmy, is becoming a hobby in which one can easily spend the price of a car, simply trying to get merely close to the best of everything.

Yes, there are *possible* safety advantages to having all this equipment... but there are also real disdvantages to having to remember and hang onto it all, and especially to being festooned with so many hoses and straps and clips retractors and bits and pieces to fall out of pockets.

Then there is the squeeze that is produced by the combination of the fact that some, even much of this equipment is overpriced (especially as tagged or listed by the typical LDS) in combination with the indifferent equipment quality of and high rental prices the LDS charges for actual diving (as opposed to course equipment). The chance to get "deals" is real at the LDS, but it is also largely negated by the limited actual selection of actual equipment in stock at most LDS's

Having to equip a family of three (myself and my newly diving wife and daughter really alerted me to this situation. paying hundreds of dollars for mediocre and ill-fitting equipment, it became a choice between giving up diving or buying some decent and safe and comfortable gear. I 've finally managed to obtain new and near new dive computers, apeks and SP regs and BC's, etc, through E-bay and private purchases, plus a large number of smaller items (including Apeks and Air-2 auxillary regs) from Leisurepro for about halfof what the LDS would have charged.

To their credit, the LDS has been helpful, and even generous by giving some free minor service and safety checkover of equipment that I did not buy from them. They were also very good about letting me try items like masks and fins in the pool, before making final choices. However, in addition to rentals and air fills, we also did spend well over a thousand dollars Canadian on sets of fins, masks, snorkels, boots knives, horns and other odd pieces of gear.

We want to continue to have a good relationship with the LDS, however, as I've told the owner myself, if we are going to continue diving, then we will have to buy much of our gear from other sources.


erickK

P.S. Although things went fine with LeisurePro, I doubt that the principals involved are really divers. I have the impression that this operation is rerlated to the major camera store (Adorama), and is one of many such successful high volume Manhattan MO operations owned and run purely as a business.

Dive Inn (Scubastore) does seem to be more of a diving operation, and frankly I would have no hesitation ---and would probably prefer ---to buy from them.

ek


ek