Doing the Right Thing

So after I was castigated by Cisco's customer support people for buying from Amazon, who they class as a "grey importer", I decided to do the right thing this time. And look where it got me.

I decided to upgrade my load-balancing router, and chose one that is relatively inexpensive yet has more power and features than the existing one. Yes, it's a Cisco product - the RV320. It looks like it's just the thing I need to provide high performance firewalling, port forwarding, and load balancing between two ISPs.

On Amazon there are several comments from customers who bought one, indicating that the one supplied had a European (rather than UK) power supply. Probably because those suppliers are not UK-based. That does sound like it's a grey import, and - like last time - means I wouldn't get any technical support. However, there are UK-based suppliers on Amazon as well, so I could have ordered it from one of these, and easily returned it if it wasn't the UK version.

But, instead, I used the Cisco UK site to locate an approved Cisco retailer located in the UK, and placed an order with them. Their website said they had 53 in stock and the price was much the same as those on Amazon, though I had to pay extra for delivery of the real thing. Still, the small extra charge would be worth it to get technical support, and just to know that I had an approved product.

And two weeks later, with two promised delivery days passed, I'm still waiting. The first excuse was that their suppliers had not updated the stock figures over the holiday period. So in actual fact they didn't have any in stock, despite what the website said. Probably the 53 referred to what the UK Cisco main distributor had in its warehouse. And, of course, they sold all 53 over the holiday period. Maybe, like me, all network administrators choose the Christmas holiday to upgrade their network.

A query after the second non-delivery simply prompted a "we'll investigate" response. So much for trying to spread my online acquisition pattern wider than just Amazon. I could have ordered one from Amazon.co.uk at the same price and had it installed and working a week ago. Or even paid for next-day delivery from Amazon, sent it back for replacement twice, and still be using it now. In a world that is increasingly driven by online purchasing and fast fulfilment, an arrangement of the words "act", "together", "your", and "get" seems particularly applicable if they want to remain competitive.

But I suppose I should have remembered that you can't believe everything you read on the Internet...