XoticPC Purchase and Review in Progress

Just wanted to post my experience with XoticPC with my recent purchase and will update as I go. This is my second purchase from them. So far it has been painless with contacts responded to within 24 hours.

I contacted sales on October 12th to ask which discounts I would be eligible for since I was a return customer, paying by check, and wanted to use the free shipping code. I was told by Derek S. I could use the free shipping code with the cash discount but it would drop the cash discount to 2%.

I submitted my order on the 13th with the codes cashrebate and FREESHIP. I received the automatic invoice and waited for the actual price from their processor.

On October 14th I was contacted by Ada who was processing my order and given the total, however; the total was not correct so I emailed Ada back asking why and they responded on the 15th that they forgot to add the free shipping code and just processed the 3% cash discount. Ada then gave me a corrected total with a 2% cash discount and free shipping.

On October 20th I received an e-mail that my check was received and my order is now pending the check clearing. You can speed up this part if you send them a copy of the check once it clears your account, which I plan on doing.

October 21st the check has cleared my account and I submitted the images to XoticPC. On October 22nd I received and e-mail back that they received the images and clearing time is an estimated 5 days from the time the check was deposited.

October 27th my order has now moved in to the next phase after check clearing, Phase 1 payment cleared and approved for production.

October 28th the order has been moved into Phase 2 (Sager Assembly, Build, Technical Analysis, Stress Testing & QA).

October 30th my order is now at Phase 7 (Packaged & Shipped).

October 31st, I received an e-mail from Emily at XoticPC informing me I am receiving a refund of ~$16 that I missed from not mentioning my membership here. I contacted Hutsady on the forums previously (See note below) and he relayed it to my sales rep Derek and now I will get the check in the mail

November 4th, the laptop arrived today but there is a problem. The first thing I tried to do was install my SSD in the free bay under the optical drive so I could get Windows on. However, once I removed the external panel I found the screw holding the optical drive had been either cross threaded, severely over-tightened, or both. It was almost completely stripped and three of us tried to carefully remove the screw using various stripped screw tricks but it would not turn in the slightest and completely stripping out. I have fired off an e-mail to my sales associate for some suggestion. I'm pretty disappointed the screw came that messed up and I'm at a standstill until it's out then I need a replacement regardless.

November 5th, I received contact on the forums and a response to my e-mail about the screw problem. I was placed in touch with support who's contacting Sager. So far between the sales team and the support team they're right on top of it, which I appreciate.

November 7th I submitted a request to return the system for refund. The system left a sour taste in my mouth having it sit here unusable and Sager still hasn't offered a solution. I will be going with a different manufacturer for my gaming notebook.

November 14th, XoticPC received the Sager back.

November 24th, I ordered a MSI to replace the Sager using the RMA credit. Waiting for the order to process with the help of Barry H handling the transition between RMA and new order.

November 28th I received an e-mail stating my refund was lower then expected so I responded with some questions.

December 2nd After not receiving a response yet I entered XoticPC's online chat with Derek and he got answeres from the other departments about the refund. Sager charged $90 on the refund for 2 scratches, one on the lid and one on the bottom, the Laptop was literally taken out of the box, attempted to remove their defective stripped screw, and placed back in the box. I will not be recommending Sager anymore on Hardforums (14 year member there) where I have suggested them time and time again in Mobile and private sections of the forum. Sager will not see a penny from me or my recommendation. So ridiculous I received a bill for their incompetence since it should have been a 2 second screw out and in job to change a hard drive. At this point I think I will cancel my second order and just take my RMA refund until I decide what to do. Derek and Hutsady are both assets to XoticPC, I don't wish to convey otherwise,some of their other departments could use work and Sager is just plain horrible.

December 3rd I received an e-mail (before I looked here and saw Tanner's response) stating that the refund was adjusted to a full refund minus shipping, which I never expected to get back. XoticPC has been nothing but professional and helpful but Sager won't get my money. I went ahead with my MSI GT72 order and just had to pay the difference between the Sager and MSI with my credit card (by placing an order for a small accessory with a note that I dind't want the item just to use the credit card for my laptop order). Hopped on here to see Tanner's response, glad to see they work so hard over multiple mediums for the client.

December 4th Order status changed to order received and processing.

December 5th Order status changed to Phase 1 (Payment Processed & Inventory Gathering)

December 9th I received an e-mail from Derek that MSI will no longer be selling the MSI GT72-406 and XoticPC will not be fulfilling the open orders. I looked at the other options for a replacement and I just can't kick in the extra money I have right now for one that's within the dimensions I was looking for.

December 11th Order status changed to cancelled, I am now awaiting refund.

Special thanks to the following XoticPC guys for their help:
Derek - Awesome sales guy and after sales help that answers questions sometimes within minutes via e-mail.
Hutsady - Awesome help here on the forums when I discovered I missed a discount after reading his post in another thread, he got the discount rolling for me.
Tanner - Awesome guy, I wish he could handle every aspect of every RMA, no one would run in to troubles, super helpful via e-mail and here on NBR.


That's it for now, I will update as the order continues.

 

Your process was similar to mine. I had to contact them a few times to get things right. They gave me an additional discount (something like 15USD) for return customer. I generally recommend XoticPC as they are professional and reasonable. Their process could use some work. I missed out on an upgrade to an i7-4800MQ because they were unwilling to have Sager begin building the machine until after the cashier's check cleared and Sager went out of stock. I think they could afford to start building the machine when they receive payment but just not release it for shipment until they have cash in hand. With that said, I still wholeheartedly recommend them.

 

Clarification on why we do this. Check payments are a very insecure way of payment these days with high quality printers and just the art of forgery being as advanced as what it is. It's not uncommon for us to receive fraudulent orders and payments every day. So in order to still viably accept them from a financial standpoint we have to have that clearing time before anything is touched on the order as everything that's done on it is costing us money. Processing the paperwork to get to Sager, have Sager do their paperwork on it and get into their system, potentially even starting the build before that check clears, and so on... It's a lot of internal labor cost and neither us nor anybody that accepts check payment is willing to expend that labor when a check could potentially be fraudulent. That being said, we do still want to accept them as there are those that are willing to wait for a little extra money off. In some cases though, as you experienced, options and pricing change time to time. Alternatively we could do like most other businesses these days and not accept check payment, we want to provide options though as not one form of payment fits everyone's needs. It's pretty rare for a situation to arise as what this is, vast majority go through without any issue with prices fluctuating,

Glad to hear everything is going smoothly for you! Let me or anybody here at Xotic know if you have any questions.

 

I for one, am glad XoticPC still excepts checks. I contacted my credit union about a wire transfer instead and they wanted $25 to do the transfer, which would completely negate the savings. My bank account allows me to view the front and back of cleared checks for free, so it was just a matter of logging into my account, saving the pictures, and sending them to XoticcPC to speed up the clearing time. That and the cost of the stamp to initially send off the check saved me 2% of my purchase price. It especially made sense since when I ordered the 970m it wasn't available until the end of October, it's not like I was in a huge rush to wait anyway

 

Laptop arrived today, unfortunately it arrived with a problem, I have updated the main post.

 

Got your email this morning and forwarded over to our service/support team. They're the best to take care of it quickly for you and should be able to get it all taken care of.

 

Thanks Derek, I'll wait for their e-mail before I try anything drastic (IE JBWeld) to get the screw out. Never in my life have I seen such an obstinate screw!

 

I was CC'd into an email you got this morning asking for pictures we can share with Sager. Pretty rare for their techs to do something like this and so we want to get their input on it. Haven't heard anything back from either side since, so heads up in case you didn't receive the email might want to check your spam filter.

 

I have nothing in e-mail or in spam as of yet. Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of the before stripping where it was mostly stripped, now it's completely stripped out and didn't budge at all.

 

I sent you a PM with the email pasted into it. Has his direct contact info to provide the information to.

 

I completely understand. In light of this I can think of two things that could help. First, on the order form XoticPC should put an estimated delivery date (or range of dates) next to each shipping/payment option. With dynamic programming languages this isn't too difficult to do. Second, is that if you offer USPS Money Orders, USPS should be able to give you cash-in-hand upon receipt of the money order. It costs the buyer very little and guarantees that if USPS cashes the money order that no one can come back and bite you in the butt for fraudulent orders. Then just make your policy that they have to write the shipping address on the Money order so you have proof of where the laptop was supposed to go and that legit payment was connected to that address.

 

It all sounds simple and easy to do, as with most things that seem easy though it's not quite as simple as just saying yes lets do this. Even with Money orders, USPS or otherwise, we require the same clearing time as the same problems have been experienced with them. There is a window of time that USPS can hit us up and basically say that it was their bad, it was a fraudulent money order, they're going to take that money back. It's been done before, bites us where don't want to be bit, and at that point we're out money as well as the machine it was intended to pay for.

We have a site update in the works that will be going live in the near future and address this but at this time our site doesn't allow the sort of information you're indicating to include. We do list all this information in our FAQ page, our payment info page, as well as in our email to the customer providing check payment instructions at the same time the final total is given. No way for us to currently include in the checkout process.

 

Your point about the money order even from USPS being potentially fraudulent is understood. As a two time XoticPC customer my experience with wading through the processing times and policies with this and that was that it was confusing and overly complicated precisely because there is so much to read to figure it out. As a software developer I can tell you that it's actually very easy to put a dynamic date range next to each bubble. For example, 11/10 I purchase a system from Sager and choose the cash option and my customizations don't require the box to be shipped to xoticpc. To calculate the date range of delivery to my door just have the backend do the math (shortest days to receive payment)+(shortest days to process payment)+(shortest sager build days)+(shortest ship days to my door). Then do the same calculations for the longest times and display that date range next to the option for cash payments. It's a nice and easy way of setting your customer's expectations and it doesn't even require a change in your policy.

Here is something else to consider
- Return customers are more of a known quantity for you. You could have them scan and send you a picture ID which you could compare with what you have on file. This would show you that their account isn't being hacked. Give your return customers more leeway once confirmed. Here is what I mean: Once you receive that payment and process it to get cash on hand as well as a scanned copy of the check from the return customer, then start the sager build with the order while you are waiting on that waiting period. Then only release the sager build for shipping once that final waiting period has been completed. Then if for some reason the check comes back fraudulent you haven't yet shipped the order and losses are minimal. If the final waiting process completes then great! no time was wasted waiting for the final waiting period before you started building the system. Lower risk for you, happier return customer.

 

Again is sounds simple but to do what you're saying it's assuming the checkout service we use supports that, which it doesn't. Our new update will allow us to and we already plan on doing so, but we can't currently.

We also don't keep any customer information on file due to privacy concerns. We don't want to be held liable for that in the event the worst happens and it gets obtained somehow.

I am not saying you're wrong and what you are saying does have its merits. If it were simple to implement it would be done so already. It's something we're working towards but it's not quite ready yet. We'll have the updated site ready to go and usable but until then we have to keep with the way it's currently done and providing all that information on our site as well as email updates. I do agree it's a lot to read but it's only a lot to read because there is a lot of information to share. We don't try to hide this in any way and try to make it as obvious as we can with the way the site currently is. It's what we've been doing for years and very rarely is it ever an issue due to us providing all that information to every customer for every purchase to be paid for by a cash method.

 

Thanks Derek. Don't get me wrong. I am very pleased with XoticPC which is why I purchased from them a second time. My next purchase will likely be from XoticPC and I typically recommend them to friends when they ask me for computer recommendations. I'm looking forward to seeing that site redesign.

 

I posted an update, I don't think Sager will see my business again.

 

We are seeing if their is anything that can be done on this, once we hear a response we will update customer.

 

We worked with Sager and the deductions for damages have been waived by on this return with a little nudge from XOTIC PC. Sometimes we are not able to get these deductions waived but in this case we were able to as the scratches were pretty minor.

 

Thanks Tanner, I got the update earlier today and went ahead with my MSI order. XoticPC has been nothing but professional, but it will still take a whole lot for me to order another Sager. Luckily though, you guys sell MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, and Alienware so that shouldn't be an issue. I look forward to my MSI

 

Updated with the end to my saga for now, I am awaiting a refund. XoticPC notified me that the MSI model I ordered (GT72-406) will not be fulfilled and the model was canceled by MSI. I looked for a suitable replacement but I will just hold out until after the holidays and tax season and got with a higher spec'd GT72.