ThurstonX
Headphoneus Supremus
You shouldn't have to pay for defective merchandise. HiFiMan would have an international shipping account that they could use to get this done for you, and that is commonly done. Again I think HFM performs well below acceptable standards when it comes to both quality control and customer service, certainly by North American standards. Here you have arguably the most popular headphone community research site on the Internet and they allow dissatisfied customers to experience such subpar quality testing and subsequent service and post about it here, are they nuts? I would without a doubt arrange courier shipment for you and do everything I could to mitigate your displeasure. Now if you have only asked the Australian distributor for service that is another thing.
The first thing you should do/should have done is contact HFM directly and insist that as this is a defective product you should not be responsible for any burden of shipping at all, and they must set-up the pickup with their account. You paid your part of shipping when you purchased the original set, and more than you should have if you paid for the first set to be returned. My concern would be that the Australian distributor just checked over the set, couldn't replicate the fault and sent it back to you.
Did you make sure you were given a brand new set? If I were you I would right away contact HFM directly. If the faults manifested themselves right away that triggers an enhanced responsibility on the part of the manufacturer as opposed to a product that has been used for some time. I know that customers need to bare some of the risk, but not for right out of the gate defective goods, especially multiple failures. Are the headphones themselves marked with a serial number anywhere that the customer can see? A paper serial number is little evidence to my mind, I want to know the product is stamped in a way that a customer can see if need be.
If you can't control your quality issues as a company, that is the companies problem, not the customers. I feel strongly that HFM need to step it up and pay for their issues. Why? Because once a company starts losing money from quality control issues they fix the problem plain and simple. Simple economics, customers pain and expense, lower motivation, companies pain and expense, higher motivation.
Even if there was a small flat fee that customers paid I could get behind that a little, but this 100% hit to the customer is shocking to me. If nothing else this shows that the testing at HFM needs to be improved. Perhaps the faults being discovered are such that the existing procedures would not detect, but if so again, the company thanks the customer for helping them improve and they pay for the shipping, they don't nickel and dime the customer to death.
Tough love I know, but I will gurantee you once the financial pain becomes theirs to bare, solutions will follow. It isn't that they are a bad company, all companies will seek to download risks on their customers if they feel they can get away with it. North American companies used to be bad as well (and some doubtless still are, but they will lose marketshare over time), but years of consumer activism (which this post is meant to be) forced companies to step up their game. HFM runs the risk of losing customers to other companies if they fail to respond. We might see Audeze step up their game and bring excellent products (such as a working 560 can be) at a more competitive price. Oppo can also seriously up their game and we know they have the scale of economy to out compete smaller companies so the last thing HFM needs to be is complacent with quality control and customer service. Okay for the last time HFM, get these problems ironed out, and make sure that customers feel valued and are not asked to pay for lax quality control standards (if that is what is happening here).
If I am wrong, and for some technical reason there was no way the issues being raised here with these customers could have been detected, than I apologize, but I just don't see how that could be. It is these multiple failure unit customers that make my blood boil. In my business I bend over backwards to keep customers. If doing so is too expensive I would either need to improve the process causing the profit to be too low, or stop selling the problem merchandise. Seriously, am I being too hard on HFM here?
While I agree with you 100% in principle, I'll play devil's advocate and say that for small companies the reality and practice are quite different. There are a few things of which we are unaware: total units produced and sold, percentage of those that have been returned as defective, and percentage of those customers who complained about the cost of return shipping vs. those who just paid it. All that, combined with the gambler's sense of What can we get away with?, influence the policy. Given that the small company is often a majority direct order operation, there's little chance the consumer has any recourse but to accept the policy, or keep the defective product, and quite possibly stop doing business with that company, and use forums like this to alert others to the consequences of purchasing a possibly defective product.
If the company thinks their schiit is good enough, and that customers will prefer to return a defective unit for repair or replacement rather than go without or look elsewhere, and if, indeed, that's their experience, then the policy won't change. I agree that producing an inordinate number of defective units will force a change, as word will get out and potential customers will be put off. That will affect QC, but will not likely change the return shipping policy. What's a dissatisfied customer going to do, sue? Not even remotely likely, mostly because you tacitly (or actively, if you actually read the fine print) agreed to the company's policy when you bought the product.
The power supply in my Lyr died after less than three months. Was I pissed that I had to pay nearly $20 to ship it back to them? Of course. Was I willing to do it? Of course, because I wasn't willing to eat $450 for a fancy door stop, and am not dishonest enough to sell it on eBay. That's just the price we pay for dealing with small companies. I don't see it changing as long as the gambler's margins pay off for the company.
Again, just playing devil's advocate. The QC issue with HFM is off-putting. I've had nice exchanges with their service reps, and can't complain there. They don't set the policies. If I had to send back two pairs of the same HFM cans, I'd sell the third, buy something else, and bid the company good day. Fortunately, I've had good luck with my HFM cans. Luck, of course, should not enter into it.