Official Thread for COMETA Refunding - Problem solving

The Professional guy never answer my PM :disappointed:

+1

After the latest email from one of their “professional” guys asking for yet more pictures & videos so that they can “Then we will check and give you a solution.” I have given up ever getting a refund or any sort of satisfactory solution.
I have now sourced & ordered the necessary parts myself to repair my Cometa”s to the best of my ablity.
I will make them as close to the spec I was led to believe they were going to be & at least they will be safe.
The only thing that I can”t do anything about is the host not being a Z1 but I will be putting square profile “O” rings on it to firm up the zoom action.
I have ordered 20awg wire to replace the 24awg led wires plus do spring bypasses, genuine Z1 lens & lens caps, another member has sent me butterfly spacers to go between the led & anodised retaining disc (thanks :+1: ), I will see if I can do something about the slop in the driver pocket & I had already made insulating discs for the pill bottom.
I have also learned that when a Chinese seller tells you that they can”t send you a replacement unless you close your paypal dispute as “the system won”t let them” that actually what they mean is close your paypal dispute & that way you can never get a refund from us.
Pretty disappointed to be honest concerning this whole saga.

My Cometa shorted out and melted the spring. I emailed customer service to get the washer kit and now they want videos and pictures. Man, all I asked for a the washer kit to make this light safe. I didn’t ask for a refund or any other replacement parts. I don’t feel like I should have to waste my time with all this crap to just get a washer kit!

No matter what; the build quality of this flashlight is very poor due to the excessive rattle. BG sold this light knowing the poor quality so they committed fraud. I have already asked for refund and at no point will the light be sent back to China. My advice for all BLF members is to keep the disputes open and to cause as much conflict as possible in order to expose BG’s choice to sell a defective product in a bait a switch campaign.

Where can those be found? What size works?

how can you fix the sloppy nature of the zoom adjustment for this light

I suggest the opposite. The more conflict you cause, the more conflict you end up with.
That steals energy away from anyone who has any interest in doing anything about this.
People give up quickly when they’re dealing with people who want to cause conflict.
Why bother, eh?

I followed my own advice — which I learned from longtime members here who’ve been through this before.
I wrote up the problems, emailed them, and posted the same info as a cautionary “review” — twice — on the sale page.
Nothing more. Nothing long, nothing complex, no big words, no conflict, no yelling at the poor customer service kids who don’t read English at all.

They refunded my money without my even asking for a refund, long ago, as I mentioned when it happened.
I don’t like the way they’re handling this. But it does look to me like the more hassle you cause, the longer you stay on the string, the more links get created to their product in search engines, and the more attention they, and you, get.

Ironically, the more you mention this, the higher Google will rank it as a popular search term.

There may be “no such thing as bad publicity” — but publicity may not be what you’re here for.

That’s just, like, my opinion, man. Yours is different, because you’re you and I’m not.

To each his own. The goal is to win and I see no reason to be nice to someone that lied to me or all the members of BLF.

I went to my local plumbers merchant with a Cometa & asked him if he had some square profile “O” rings that would fit between the cooling fins & sit fractionally proud of them.
He rummaged around in a box of assorted “O” rings & found some that did the job.
I fitted them between every other fin & there is no head wobble now.

Can you post a picture?
I’m wondering if the O-rings will hold the metal threads away from each other and reduce heat transfer from the inside to the outside.

(If so, maybe making rings out of copper wire about the same size might accomplish the rattle control and improve heat transfer. Just speculating here)

curious as to what this looks like myself.

I have to say hank that your experience with BG CS has been very different to the majority of buyers & I am pretty sure (from reading posts on here & on CPF Italia) that most of them have been very polite (I certainly know that I have been).
There hasn”t seemed to be any sort of uniformity in the way tickets have been handled.
Even when members have raised paypal disputes some have just been immediately refunded others have had refunds refused, again no rhyme or reason as to what the individuals outcome will be.
As I have said I am not prepared to waste any more of my time sending countless pictures & videos to show BG problems that they are already well aware of.
I am putting this whole episode down to experience but I have learned one thing & that is to be very very careful in future.

Hank. here is the problem with your approach. Yes, some members have had success proceeding as you- and they- suggest. However, it is at least as likely, if not more so, that being nice in this situation will get you nowhere. There are plenty of people who have followed the advice you have given and ended up getting nowhere.

Case in point, in well over a hundred orders from Chinese venders, I’ve had a small proportion go bad for one reason or another. I always take the diplomatic approach before reporting to PP disputes or strongly worded emails. A couple of orders ago, I had an issue with BangGood. Before I did anything else, I sent a polite PM to Neil and never (like not even as of today… which has been months and months) heard back.

In the end, it is always going to be a crapshoot and the odds are not in the buyer’s favor no matter how polite you are. They can do third grade math just as well as the rest of us; they know it is cost prohibitive to send stuff back because western countries don’t have subsidizes mail like they do. For better or for worse, regarding bargaining position, they hold the high ground, so to speak.

Personally, given that flashlight enthusiasts such as ourselves are not a big enough group to hurt them by simply foregoing future purchases, I think our biggest bargaining chip is to use social media, Fakepage, YouTube, Instagram, gear forums, and the like to alert any who might listen about their poor customer service generally and the COMETA specifically.

Doing this is the polar opposite of what we normally do. Typically we take to those platforms and do third party advertising for them that adds tremendously to the hype and marketing of these lights.

I do agree with you about one thing though, Hank, our opinions are indeed diametrically different on this issue.

I am not at home for the next couple of days & don”t have the Cometa”s with me as none work at the moment, I will have to post a picture next week.
While I am online anybody have any suggestions to what driver would be suitable to replace the original drivers & where to get them from (I am in the UK so shipping costs from the US may be prohibitive).
Probably something with just low, medium, high & turbo.

I haven’t seen anyone else report getting a refund, so if someone actually knows and has been keeping track, consider reporting on what people did that worked.
It may be purely random luck getting the attention of someone there who can create a refund.
As I’ve said I’m not happy with the method — once I got the refund, I was no longer able write reviews on the sale page (which I’d done a couple of times just before they refunded my payment.)
I’d intended to keep re-submitting the same review patiently figuring it would eventually show up — it would have cut down the “five star” review rating they had (have?) up on the sale page.
I haven’t looked lately to see if they’re still showing nothing but positive reviews.

Anyhow, dinging that “five star” rating would have happened if they’d accepted the reviews I tried submitting. That’s my guess why they sent a refund, to get me off the list of buyers.

Hank, would you characterize the repeated posting of negative reviews on the light’s product page as part of taking the high road of politeness and diplomacy you were advocating in post #101?

I ask because it seems like you are suggesting in post 3109 that it was the squeaky wheel approach that encouraged them to get them to offer a refund to you and not sweet as pie correspondence that won the day for you.

I wrote a straightforward review, calmly describing the known problems and giving links where to read about them.
If it had appeared it would have knocked the “five stars” rating down considerably.

When my review hadn’t appeared after a week or so I tried posting the same again.
I hadn’t done any email or PM contacts at all about the light.
I basically said no naive user get should one without understanding the issues.

At some point I ’oogled “cometa” and found that “forum” page for the product.

Someone there had the thread saying he’d tried to post a review, complaining the review was not appearing.
(last time I looked that was still findable by a search, and it includes the same pointers and cautions)

I commented in that forum thread, saying I had the same problem with a bad review not appearing.

Shortly after that, I got mail saying they’d refund the purchase, and they did.

So basically that’s three little squeaks. No angry email, no PMs, no demands.

I’ve not been particularly surprised or upset.
I’m well aware of “quality creep” as an issue.

I care about solving that before people move up from cheap flashlights to building nuclear plants and big buildings.
Seriously.

The US went through this in the 1800s. Nobody else should repeat that grim history. We know better ways. Checklists, QA, QC.

I am very sure there are people trying hard to solve these problems.
I am very sure it’s damned hard to get past the cheap fast profit approach.
The US did that to some extent, very slowly, with a lot of misery and it’s still not done, it takes constant attention to do reliably good work.

As Bradbury said, “I don’t write to predict the future. I write to prevent it.”

Found… http://forum.banggood.com/forum-topic-171246.html

The Banggood behavior is unacceptable, after producing a dangerous torch, not working, and mechanically low-quality; You do not want to refund users!
and does not admit mistakes propi! with their community of enthusiasts flashlights earn much money, maybe they do not understand that they are the same customers who buy torches like this.
Such conduct must be reported! banggood | Leggi le recensioni dei servizi di www.banggood.com do our part,
can not make fun of us and of our money;