We have had a tough run, it’s true. Lots of chargebacks severely impacted our production plans.
But we always deliver, eventually! - Can’t say that for some companies.
Goods news is we have some really big batches of orders finishing up. everyone who orders gets their products. We also have our ticketing system in much better shape now. Way too many people emailing us for support on their DIY builds, we obviously can’t solve everyone DIY issues and nor should we have to. It clogs up the system.
Fixed that for ya
Correct me if I’m wrong Carl. But those 50 boards you’re about to send out still have the wheels that fall apart before 200kms potentially injuring the rider.
If you delayed production of the unity due to 2 people falling off your boards, why are you continually shipping boards where the wheels are known to fall off?
Now considering the range of the board is reported to be 40kms, and the wheels dont last 200kms, you’re pushing a product that lasts for 5 recharges on average before its time to change the wheels and play russian roulette with the pavement again.
So while youre so proud of sending out your faulty boards, I would argue sending out those boards knowing their mode of failure is negligent. The products are not fit for purpose under Australian Consumer Law and need to be refunded. Considering its a known ongoing issue if anyone injures themselves on your faulty product damages will be granted due to negligence.
Seems like dropping the 20% refund fee would’ve saves Enertion some money and a big headache.
Thanks for your feedback hobz - manufacturing hardware is really hard and we are not yet experts at it. pretty much every electric skateboard company has got some embarrassing history that they would rather people forgot about.
Ok, so you have some goods points, let me clear things up for you.
Bad Wheel quality is not affecting 100% of all customers, it’s an issue related to the raw materials used in some batch of wheels. We identified these batches and discarded hundreds of wheels. However some did slip through the net because we didn’t have serial numbers on our wheels it was hard to locate & seperate the bad from the good. We are confident that this problem has been reduced significantly. However it extremely hard to check for bad quality in wheels without riding on them. So we are monitoring it very closely and have new formulas slowly entering into the production pipeline. I think this is a well documented issue now and our customers will report any issues to us & we report this back to the wheel factory and they get new wheels sent for free. We will also be making some wheels in california wheel factory and they should be read later in the year. We expect the quality of those to be superior. However, they will still eventually wear out. These wheels are consumables and eventually need to be replaced.
The range of the board is up to absolute MAX of 40 km range, this is written clearly on the website. Most fully grown adult men realistically would get between 25km & 35km. I think most people understand that range is a variable depending on temperature, wind, terrain etc. The Raptor has about 3x the range of a boosted board for the same price. In fact the Raptor is ranked in the top three for range in this price category.
We are definitely NOT proud to send out products with faults, hence why we constantly delay production to improve parts or change assembly factories if the quality control is slipping. But strangely some of our customers do seem to insist that we speed up production despite the problems we face. It’s a tricky balance between quality & speed - this is something we are dedicated to solving.
We will be dropping this policy very soon actually, we are extremely close to having all our back orders filled and it is our intention to sell from “instock” inventory only. We achieved this primarily by restructuring our B2B model. Once this milestone is achieved we don’t need to have the order retention incentive!
ALSO, its worth noting, This policy of 20% cancellation fee is clearly written on our website. We never tried to hide it. Basically we just don’t want people to order from us if they might eventually cancel. The cancelled orders are what causes massive delays because we cannot afford to pay the suppliers in a timely manner meaning everyone else gets impacted by delays. Even just a few cancelled orders can cause weeks of delays.
Historically, the pre-order model is a failure, many other companies have failed due to this model, and we are trying to move away from that as fast as possible.
@CarlCollins if you don’t mined me asking-
Where did all the profits from the last batch go? (Unless there were no profits after paying employees,factories etc)
maybe the electric skateboarding industry isn’t very profitable.
Let me get some of that lol
I want to get to the heart of the problem for me. Why do you think its reasonable to decline a full refund on a board that was estimated to be delivered in 8-10 weeks, that still hasnt been received 22 weeks later after missing 4 seperate deadlines, and several broken promises?
How do you expect your customers to feel being treated this way? Do you think its fair?
We are very sorry for this situation hobz all refunds will be processed once it is financially possible.
From my understanding, huge amounts of cash were invested into big orders to ramp up production and satisfy the growing demand for enertion products. Our goal this year was to transition from doing pre-sale to holding stock in warehouses in USA & Europe and only selling items that were in stock. That requires huge capital investment & enertion doesn’t have any angel investors willing to loan them the huge lump sums of cash, the business has been bootstrapped by Jason from the beginning, he also has invested his own personal money into this and does not earn any wage from the business.
Sadly it seems our big plan got derailed after some unforeseen issues, like the focbox unity firmware bug & jig redesign, assembly factory failing to deliver according to agreed quality criterias, wheel factory delivery bad batches etc, which resulted in factory relocations etc… all these issues caused long delays and ultimately following this is a huge amount of chargebacks due to order delays. There are people on this forum actively promoting the option of chargebacks, it extremely damaging concept and should not be done as innocent people get hurt by that.
When people do chargebacks the banks take money out of enertion account immediately no questions asked, whether the funds are present of not, because enertion paid so much money to build up inventory there is now financial strain on the company. This issue can be resolved, but it’s a slow process.
The good news is that 100 boards just got finished & another 300 are in the pipeline for completion over the next 8 to 12 weeks. Since suppliers will not return the money, they will only deliver the parts that were ordered enertion must push through and complete these orders & once stock has arrived enertion can finally start making some sales campaigns for the Raptor & Unity again to recover the cash. The unity will be available in amazon USA store in about 4 weeks.
This is obviously a terrible situation for people who ordered products then changed their minds and asked for refunds, the timing is really bad, but enertion always delivers! We have never failed to deliver on our promises. We have had to make some big changes and had to restructure the business to make it operate more efficiently and the improvements are already starting to appear.
Hobz, We are very sorry that this transaction hasn’t gone to plan, we must now work harder than ever before to improve and we will demonstrate this in the near future. Nobody will be forgotten.
Don’t start blaming the customer for losing trust in a company due to numerous mistakes make by Enertion. What did you truly expect would happen?
#enertionmoneyclip. The irony.
So I’ve basically been tricked into funding a kickstarter campaign but I’m still paying top dollar and receiving no return on my investment. If this was an investment opportunity into a company to receive a board when it was available for production and not a contract for sale why wasn’t it stipulated? The law is very clear on the difference, or am I misunderstanding you?
Why isn’t is possible to simply take the money from your next Raptor sale, and give it to whomever is requesting a refund, and reallocate that board?
The only reason I can see is that the company is so riddled with debt that all sales are covering your debts, and your company is on the verge of collapse as it continues to expose itself to more and more backorders. Combined with the companies return rate, the fact that it isn’t paying it’s staff (Baja and Jason at the least apparently), and reports from former staff that the company is broke, leads me to think Enertion’s bankruptcy could very likely happen.
When this happens who will be the innocent people that lose money Carl?
We’re currently in the stage where your company feeds us excuses and promises in order to stop the flow of chargebacks, because you have failed to deliver on your contract of sale. When a company needs to break the law (this I intend to prove) in order to stay afloat, I can’t see why you would expect people to let you hold onto their money. In fact, I think any financial advisor would strongly recommend to cut and run.
I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to answer my questions Carl, but I don’t feel safe in the fact you have nearly AUD$3000 of my money, and I’d like it all returned.
Pls don’t rip us.
Also, what’s wrong with forum member retailers? Amazon charges a fee doesn’t it?
Good to see your dumping the 20% bullshit. Probably would have saved you all these chargebacks (and a lot of trust/public image/ customer perceived professionalism).
Just hope you guys didn’t do something horrible like use the unity startup funds to get the Raptor into retail stores as your emails around that time mentioned…thereby slowing the unity output to a trickle to maintain customer trust.
But let me be completely clear, definitely no accusations, just seen it happen a couple times now. Doesn’t end well usually.
What a fucking shit show.
I’m sorry but promotional tours only happen when all the orders are fulfilled and stock is available otherwise it just looks like a kick in the teeth.
removing preorder from the websites product description to promote sales when you don’t have the item in stock is dishonest. 9 weeks isn’t in stock. This, which was a surprise to me in the first place is now overdue and there’s others in way worse positions.
Surely you can see these types of things are what causes customers to resort to chargebacks and is 100% extortions fault especially when breaching consumer law regardless if it’s in the terms and conditions or not.
It was an expensive (to me) lesson to learn and when the company finishes its world tour and realizes that maybe that money would have been better spent fulfilling orders and goodwill with existing customers than trying to drum up more suckers it’ll be too late and I’ll just have to chalk up my order as a contribution to Jason’s holiday trip around the world when the whole operation goes belly up. Yay.
A bit like how I felt when I was in Paris for the Esk8 Cup, and in London for a ride as part of their tour… fortunately received my Unity now, but lost a summer of riding in the process… :-/
You do support it, otherwise you wouldn’t have suggested it to me.
Yes it is covered, as you are required to deliver a product meeting the expectations under both EU (for me) and Australian law (for you). This is a minimum guarantee, and not something you can change by some “policy”. I hate to make a treat with a charge-back again, but if you refuse to help and comply with the law I don’t see another choice.
Don’t confuse my kindness for weakness, and you are pretty close to the end of it.
link to this info ??? Enirtion are a joke, jason thinks we are all idiots and he can use our money to travel the world while ignoring customers and releasing dangerous products
manufacturing suggests you make something!!!
Outsourcing to china to make a product that cost $30 to make (as the invoice in the box tells us when we receive the items drop shipped from china with original receipt) Then charging over $300 (a 10x mark up) and never keeping items in stock.
How can a company fail so badly making a 10x profit margin on an item they never even touch???
If your business is going down the pan theres only 1 person to blame and he is currently esk8ing his way around the world using the last of the money from Enirtion before bankruptcy!
