By On December 9th you may have rushed to purchase your Geeks Phone One in order to become one of the first owners of the device. If you did, you are indeed a Geek. But beyond that, you may not have received your phone yet and worse – might have to pay the company more money before they’ll ship it.
According to a company blog post which is only available in Spanish, there were problems with their online store which caused improper billing and recording of information. The computer translation only provides a very broad idea of the problem so any Spanish speaking readers who want to chime in down below, please do:
All the original store, that made your purchase the day of release, ie December 9, 2009, and are all incorporated in our logistics system. Any complaint or query about the status of your order directly with us you can do as it is not possible to migrate the accounts to the new system of online shops.
In the early days of the new store, much to our regret, there was a series of errors in payments IVAS and transport, these errors were not our fault, were a mistake by Paypal, as we blocked the bill for exceeding in much the average amount they have to SMEs, and it was a mess.
To overcome those mistakes we have done is to add a product in the shop (which will be visible in a few hours), which has a value for the price difference between what you have paid and what you have to pay. Notice that we have always charged less, and never, so the error is always in your advantage.
Anyway, we will contact you individually to clarify the issue.
Actually, it may be that they initially OVERCHARGED consumers and are refunding the money – I”ll have to get clarifcation. Either way, I’m a bit surprised they would only make this post available in Spanish as I’m sure they have English customers who are wondering what’s going on as well. Hopefully if you’re one of them you’ve read this and its helped a bit.
I’ll update this article when I get a bit better facts from a more accurate translation.
such are the perils of being an early adopter and buying from outside the US.
my english is a bit poor, but i’ll try to explain the text, and the situation because i have followed it in their forum.
In the cases in wich have been problems, they “INFRACHARGUED” i know the word does not exist, but i mean the oposite to OVERCHARGUE, and it explains that they are going to put a virtual product in their store so the affected customers can pay the difference ( mostly because the VATs, shipping atc). The problem seemed to be because of paypal, and they say that the are implementing other payment system for a near future.
cheers!
a little detail. The picture you have in this entry is not the actual phones design.
What a sorry piece of technology…. I would rather use two paper cups with a string attached.
Actually the translation is quite fine. What happened is that early buyers paid the full price of the phone, but that didn’t include shipping or taxes (IVA Impuesto al Valor Agregado) so what they are doing is putting up another product so that early buyers can buy that and pay for the shipping and taxes since they bought the phone on a price that didn’t include those.
SNAFU: situation normal all fucked up – this means that everything is fucked up, which is the normal situation. i see this acronym used incorrectly all the time. there’s TARFUN: things are really fucked up now, which means things are not as they should be (which maybe you meant here), and FUBAR: fucked up beyond all recognition, which is pretty self-explanatory.
as for the phone…never did understand the excitement for this puppy.
Well all the excitment about this phone is that the design of the hardware and components was developed entirely (well, most of it anyways) in Spain, and prior to this, there is no other project like it on most of europe…
Also it is a startup company with no previous expirience on the field
They didnt keep up. I was excited about this more than any other phone but the moment Snapdragon became a reality and Geeks Phone didn’t make the upgrade, they lost me.
On topic, I dont think this is something they should be charging the consumer for. If for nothing else its bad buisness. Usually when a business makes a mistake, they bite the bullet or make up for it in another way. What witholding my device until I pay you more makes me want to do is get a refund and buy something else.
Hi darling, here is my translation (I love translating). I hope it’ll sound good, cause I’m not Spanish nor English speaker :p
Hi everyone,
We have to admit it, the starting of the Geek’s Phone shop has been harsh for everyone, but we have to say it’s because of the craze of orders we had, so we won’t complain about it.
Things are already getting better, as the shop now charges what it should, which means taxes and delivery, customers sign-in correctly, and we are going to implement a direct payment to get off of Paypal (but this option will still remain). Logistic is ok too, ready for the battle, to start the deliveries and get rid of any doubt.
That said, we want to tell to the many of you who are in a bad situation that we are working on solving it.
All of those who made their purchase on the very first days of opening, the 9th of December, are already taken care of in the supply chain. If you have any question or remark on your purchase status can be sent to us, considering first that it is not possible to transfer their account to the new shopping system.
During the first days, there was an unfortunate bunch of payment errors about taxes and delivery ; it was not because of us but Paypal, which blocked our account for receiving much more payment than a small company does.
To go over theses problems, we added an item in the shop (which you’ll see in the next few hours), which represents the difference between what you paid and what you should have paid. You’ll see that you’ll always pay less, and never more, so the error is always an advantage for you.
Anyway, we’ll contact each of you to make everything clear.
Further more, we saw in the forums that there were a lot of fears about the delivery, because you wanted you change the address if the shipping was too late. To make everything ok, we’ll send a confirmation e-mail so that you could change your address if needed.
Thanks a lot, and sorry for the inconvenience. If your order went well (in most of the cases), you don’t need to worry about all of this.
Thank you… ;)
Sry for the layout
Marcel: there are cool projects from France such as the eviGroup Wallet.
Here’s my translation…sorry if it sucks. Its 2am :) I tried to keep things as true to the original language as I could…so some of the syntax may look a little funny.
The Grand Opening.
Helo everybody.
We have to recognize this: the opening of the Geeks Phone has been a troublesome event for all of you as it has been for us, but it should also be said that this mess was caused by the avalanche of orders we got today, and that’s something we can’t be troubled by. =)
Today things seem to be running smoothly, the store is now charging the correct prices including shipping and taxes, the customers have registered as they should have, we are going to initiate a direct TPV in order to reimburse excess monies through Paypal (paying through paypal will continue to be offered as an option), and everything else has been set up to start sending back the excess funds and run as normal simultaneously.
Though things are better now, we still have many of you out there who were charged incorrectly and we will repair this one by one.
All those who, on opening day–that is, December 9, 2009–have already been entered into our system. Any claim or questions you may have over the status of your account can be made directly with us, as we can no longer migrate customer accounts over to our new Online Store system.
In the first days of the new store, much to our distaste, a series of payment errors in shipping and taxing charges occurred. These errors were not directly our fault, they were mainly errors in Paypal’s system that blocked our account because we had a surprising amount of activity within our small business account, and it was all a bit of a mess.
To rectify these errors, what we have done is added a product to the store (one that will be visible in a few hours), one that will be in the difference amount between the charged and actual price, which you would then purchase. Please note that all of our erroneous charges were overcharges, and not undercharges, so this will serve to benefit you.
In either case, we will be in contact with all of you one on one in order to clear the errors.
One more thing, we’ve recently heard there being a lot of speculation in regards to the delays in orders, and that the delivery location may need to be changed in accordance with the delayed delivery date. In order to not overwhelm anybody, you will receive a phone call as soon as the shipment is ready to be sent out indicating the requested destination, and should you need to change that information, you will be given the option to do so immediately.
Many thanks and we apologize for the inconveniences. If your payment went through correctly (which most did) there is no reason to worry about the payment fix.
Thank You……. ;)
actually im hispanic and speak fluent english and spanish and B is pretty correct on what it says =o)
Thaaannnks moises ! It seems there is a lot of translators here :)
Look this translation:
http://blog.geeksphone.com/
Thanks…. ;)