Never buy from Expansys! Bad shopping experience for HTC Hero

Europe has the release of HTC Hero first, Orange and T-mobile were the first operators offering the phone. We decided to get a phone for extensive testing.

We quickly placed a pre-order from Expansys UK, and the order was quickly expired with their rep' asking us to buy in Expansys Hong Kong instead. We followed their advice and pre-ordered in Hong Kong for HK$4,812 excluding shipping.

After the launch delay, when the product was finally available (more than one week after Orange's Hero Graphite was available, one week after T-mobile's white version was available, Expansys Hong Kong had been raising the price from $4,812 (no VAT in Hong Kong) to $4,868 to $4,951 to $5,231 to 5,332 as of 5 August 2009.

Expansys contacted us thru email and said they cannot offer the product for $4,812, which was clearly a lie, since Expansys UK has been selling at 347.82 pounds (ex VAT) with 30 pounds voucher rebate. One of their rep' called Agnes Chan had said ". . . we can lower the price to HKD4,812 . . .", implying the offer is a boon to us and we should be very appreciated for their "kind" offer. And this Agnes Chan subsequently ate her words and said minimum price must be $5,000. We have immediately replied her email with her own email clearly indicating that they agreed to sell at $4,812.

Another rep called Chilli Kum (weird nice name by the way) insisted that the price was a very low price (which is not), and urged us to confirm the order with that offer. Meh. We urged them back to make sure they expire our order, instead of holding our credit card charges in the "pending confirmation" status. We are preparing the documents to follow up the case in Consumers' Council, and of course, WE RECOMMEND READERS NOT TO ORDER FROM EXPANSYS.

Then we turn to computeruniverse.de, a German site selling electrical gadgets. We had heard about this company from users who bought some Sagem phones which were otherwise unavailable to Hong Kong (As a side note, the distributor in Hong Kong for Sagem mobiles was closed down.), and the user had very good comments on this company in terms of shipping time and product choice, we decided to give it a try.

We have just ordered an HTC Hero weiss (White) and an HTC Hero silbergrau (Silver) (Quote coupon code: FW8TY5K for €5 off), and no VAT to countries outside EU means we save 75 euros on the price, offsetting the extra shipping charges incurred. We will update this blog to recommend ComputerUniverse if we receive the product in satisfactory condition.