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This info is for people who want to buy new Bitmain Antminers and who don't want to fall for misuse of trust.

Want to share my experience with BITMAIN miners after-sales service and warranty support.
To be clear - the absence of warranty and after-sales with miners that are sold.

I am a bulk buyer and purchased over 2k of different miners during only last year.
There were always troubles with service support but now the situation is really critical.
Numerous emails with managers, dozens of support tickets are left without answers.
Currently almost near 40 warranty repair tickets are open and remain uncollected at carriers destination.
Situations when the parcels that are not collected from the carrier until the 90 day "warranty" period is over are absolutely normal at BITMAIN.
And when it comes to repair of already non-warranty gear - when received back nearly 1/3 of payed and "repaired" gear is not operating.

Now during last 30-45 days all repair tickets are ignored and delivered parcels with bad hardware remain uncollected.

http://i65.tinypic.com/10z4xoi.jpg
http://i64.tinypic.com/hsvseh.jpg
http://i66.tinypic.com/2vl2wis.jpg

On 25 October I sent a PM to bitmain support on bitmaintalk to help me and propose a road map to solve this situation, but it was also left without answer.
As I see it now they really don't care about their customers financial losses due to defective gear that they sell and absence of warranty and after-sales repair support.

P.S.
First I was sure this situation could be handled the right way by the multimillion dollar company in order not to drop the positive public image, but I was left alone with my problems. ATM I have no feedback from customer service or any other source with willingness to make things good again.
I am sure there are people around the globe facing same problems with Bitmain as I do.

Sad to hear this, damn that's a long list of defective hardware  :-\

You just abuse the ticket system.

2016-09-04 opened over 50 Tickets. I have sent 4x S9 hashblade with one Ticket without problems.
The only limit is the maximum package weight. 20 or 30 kg depending on the shipping company.

Wozers!  :o
1st I gotta say that I would think that a large bulk buyer like you *should* have a direct sales rep at Bitmain and through them better contact with support... Ya know, like most large direct sales companies would do for commercial buying customers.

I'd certainly get in writing/email from Bitmain specifics on how many boards or other defective parts can be put on 1-ticket and sent in 1 package under that ticket#. Given Bitmain's Service history best to keep their tracking work load to a minimum. Wanna bet that they have folks manually entering info into their systems that communicate between Customs/shippers/and of course the repair company? ;)

Just another spoiled brat customer........ sacasm lol

Er? We are talking about what is expected in normal large biz-to-biz relations even in Asia. How us lowly peon general Consumers are treated and communicated with should be a different matter. The fact that large volume accounts are treated no differently rather speaks volumes on Bitmain service overall. Not good and seems like their business processes need a LOT of work in all departments from initial support ticketing to sending out the repaired/replaced parts.

I'm just glad that so far I've had only 2 s9 board failures and BitmainWarrenty in Colorado took care of them pronto for around $140 each.

The disturbing part as that the OP tried to contact them in several ways to figure out how they could make it right and they blew him off.  You can get away with that if you are a monopoly, which for now they are, but that may not always be the case.  I competitor that can't out-compete bitmain on price but can on service, could still make a go of it.  A competitor that can compete on cost and also has customer service will bury them.

I agree on all points 100%
Ironically, since BitFury and Canaan Creative (Avalon) has had the ah, "luxury", of time to have worked out any kinks to their 14/16nm chips and IF the resulting miners that are built using them can compete on performance/price with Bitmain -- that would be great and a huge wakeup call to Bitmain.

Overall reliability will of course be up to the miner makers (hint hint Sidehack PLEASE!!!) along with of course customer service. So far Bitmain is setting a pretty low bar on both counts so YES I would pay more for a competitors miner for equal or better speed/power performance if:
1) Better designed
2) Better customer service.

In any large production runs of equipment there will be failures but -- given proper thermal and power design considerations that should be far far less than what is being reported for the s9's.

Eth coin and now zec are doing really well.

Due to this issue. Of zero support. In some cases.

I have had okay support from bitmainwarranty in Colorado USA but many people have had many issues with the s9.

My third board arrives on the 2nd of November.

I will go back to my solar array install this repaired board.

And pull the fourth dead board then send it for repair to bitmainwarranty.

I will be up to four out of 18 boards dead along with one dead controller out of six.

Well, no he didn't. He spammed them to hell and then added another message onto the top of the spam pile. At that point you've already lost them. One ticket, collect x boxes from y location, order number z, send me out q hashing boards as replacement please.

And how did that go for this mythical manufacturer?

LMAO,there will be no competition....................ever.The writing is on the wall that non-commercial mining is almost over................

If you think Bitfury is gonna come "rescue" non-commercial mining,your batshit crazy  :D

Avalon 7 will be here before Christmas.   And competition   will be here.

The Avalon 7  may cost a little more
The Avalon 7 may  be a little less efficient

But if it does not breakdown  it will be worthwhile.

An Avalon 7 doing 10th at 1100 watts costing 1400 usd seems too expensive, but if it does not breakdown it will be okay.

Dear colleagues,

Earlier, this year I was doing like TUPSU - collected 5-10-15 boards during week or two and then sent them together in one parcel.

But it happened again and again that the parcel remained uncollected at carriers destination until the 90day warranty period was over.
Coincidence? don't think so..
I got tired explaining to some random service manager that I opened a repair ticket for some hashboards inside the warranty period, and I also added photos of the bad hashboard when it broke, of course with serial numbers.

So after my many request how to deal with already expired warranty period bitmain service proposed me to send every blade as soon as possible when it goes down and not to collect them in quantity!!!!!!

Peeps, its a BIG CHINESE WALL of unwillingness to understand (or just doing what it is told by some greedy manager on the top of it all) and abusing customers minds with answers : sorry the hash boards you sent are already out of warranty and you can pay for repair or forget about it.

SO even after I payed for the non warranty repair in the parcel that returned to me from China I find 1/3 of repaired gear doesn't operate at all!

That pretty rough behavior..they act like its the last day of the company and there will be no tomorrow to face all sh*t they dropped a day before.

I don't even count the lost of BTC bcs if I will it will be a really huge amount. Currently up to 70 hashboards from s7-s9 are still in China. The price is dropping for the gear that is away, its not mining and even if it will return repaired good it will never cover the repair and parcel price. My local customers demand their repaired s9 boards and I have nothing to return them..but excuses and will have to compensate it now or in near future.

P.S.
I will add that still there were bright moments in early September for example when I received over 20 s7 boards repaired and all operating good!
But I wouldn't start this topic if the situation wasn't critical as it is now.

P.P.S. @ Dogie: You can keep your pre-payed bitmain advocacy to yourself, unless you can offer some real help in solving this situation.

Nothing to do with being chinese.


"They haven't paid me shit" would be the phrase that comes to mind. My help is 1) don't spam, 2) don't spam again while trying to find someone to help you. Its going to be harder now but its possible.

Just a thought.

It caught on my eye.  You said you have to comp your customers.  Are these shipment that you are having problem, you are providing 3rd party resell and diagnostic and repair for the customer and then whatever that you can't fix or trouble shoot, be send back to Hong Kong?

Are these being used in Germany or elsewhere?

Local Repair Service (paid) is available in USA, Russia and Ukraine, Iceland and Serbia. (Limited Service)

@Bitmainwarranty

we know each other in person right?))just a thought.

Antminers bought by our comp were purchased at www.bitmain.com(www.bitmaintech.com) and are not only personal mine. They work for my network (clients) who are my friends, business partners, friends of my business partners, people who host miners at our facilities and who’s mining rigs we built. Our team works for hosting miners, building mining rigs and taking care of them. Most of them are located in Ukraine and Mid-Eastern EU countries, including Germany.

At this point I am reorienting our needs in service of gear to bitmainwarranty bcs they provide much more efficient solving problems with Anminers then Hong Kong.
But I also need to find solution for current critical situation with HK warranty gear.

I am interested in widening cooperation with bitmainwarranty services bcs I know that leading person and his team are working hard for keep their good name and care to make things right. Of course reorienting need some time but I am open for any cooperation that can solve my current and future needs and need of my clients, or any other person that has same issues.


@Doggie

Your posts in my thread are senseless and helpless…and please check the dictionary before using terms as “spam”.

*Spam*, according to Oxford dictionary, is irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.

So roll on and don’t annoy with your comments. Good luck.

It appears quite a number of people have those same issues :-\

Aww,no worries,you can trust ALL corporations..................And with no competition,yeah Avalon will be competitive LMAO,suurree!!!

Bitmain wins the Bitcoin race :)

Glad I'm GPU mining now LOL  :D

So......... you're reselling Bitmain hardware and are now making warranty claims for resold hardware, even though the warranty isn't transferable? This sounds like the real reason you're being denied warranty services but haven't disclosed, seeing as you are a big customer and Bitmain loves its big customers.

If they are all in  one owner Hosting Centres ,  then what's the difference ?

From my  sent  for repair 9  hashblades 4  is again broken. Bitmain China simply providing a poor repair service and it does not excuse anything.
Not even a dogie barking.

@dogie

http://i63.tinypic.com/2iq1i0.jpg

I have to say that on the 1-2 times I needed Bitmain products repaired, (they use to be really great quality and stable...but this may have changed?),  I contacted them and they gave me a repair service centre address in USA. I simply got the user to send the goods there (at my expense), Bitmain repaired them and then sent back free of charge. There wasn't any issue with reselling and loss of warranty as such. I think they are well aware that a lot of their customers are unofficial distributors/resellers and this was definitely actively encourage before....maybe that has changed too.

Do they have a repair centre in the country you are shipping the products from?

Try giving Sharif (Sales and Business Development) a shout:

Emails:
sharif@bitmain.com
sharif.allayarov@bitmaintech.com

Holy crap that's terrible business practises. This is to a huge Customer too, use little guys don't stand a chance. If you buy 1 miner and it takes at least a month to finally get it fixed that's just a waste of time, effort and cold hard cash!

There were a lot of these on ebay I just thought I should buy me one so I can start but after reading this I have to call it off,there's no service center here in my location so when something happen,there's nothing more I can do.

Okay so the tldr of this thread is he's been reselling S9 hardware under the name of Bitmain like he's a distributor - which he is not. Some of the item have died however he's sold the items and so the warranty is not transferred.

He's specifically not mentioning it to act like Bitmain is the bad guy and get people on his side but in reality he has zero claim and regardless of the warranty situation is also doing the wrong thing!

I gotta agree with ya on this Doggie.
It rather all hinges on who the legal owner of the miners are. 1st and most important, on the Bitmain invoice for the miners what does it say under Sold To:? The OP's name/company or is it his Customers name?

If he has acted as an intermediary between his "Customers" to place and finance the ordering of the miners and shipping to his hosting location and the Bitmain Invoice says sold to either him or his company then he is the warrantied owner of the miners ONLY up to the point where his Customers pay him for the miners. After that -- he has become a reseller and no warranty allowed.

Is that really their official warranty policy though? Here is what it says on their website:

Warranty

1.A 90-day warranty is provided from shipping out date. To avail this warranty,a Repair ticket must be generated by the customer on Bitmain's website
Overclocking the miner will void the warranty immediately.
2. All sales are final. No refunds will be given. Defective machines can be repaired for free under the Bitmain warranty policy. After the warranty period, machines can be repaired for the cost of parts and labor.
3. In some cases, the warranty will be void, but Bitmain can still do repairs at your own expense if requested. The following events will void the warranty:
     a. Customer removes/replaces any components by himself without receiving permission from Bitmain first;
     b. Damage caused by poor power supply, lightning or voltage surges;
     c. Burnt parts on hash boards or chips;
     d. Miner/boards/components damage due to water immersion or corrosion due to wet environment.
4. Customer must return the defective parts at own expense after opening a support ticket and troubleshooting with Bitmain's instructions.
5. If you notice there are some loose in small heatsinks, please write to info@bitmaintech.com about the case within 3 days after the package is signed showing in UPS/DHL/FEDEX's website.
Bitmain does not cover any loss of down time or delay caused by customs. Bitmain will cover shipping cost when shipping a replacement unit within the warranty period.

http://support.bitmain.com/hc/en-us/articles/223400048-Warranty


It may be different on a product by product basis...I do remember that it use to be 6 months for some products

Key word is Customer. As in who's name is on the Invoice. If it is OP's actual customer name then fine. It is up to the name of record to file the RMA and his customers need to initiate the process under their name. Who/where the miner was shipped to for hosting does not matter.

However, if the Invoices show the OP or his Company as the Purchaser ergo, Customer as referred to in BM's Warranty terms then he is screwed. He bought the miners not for his use but for his customers who I assume paid him to buy the miners through/from him and set them up. In other words he resold them.

Thanks for support K!
Yes I have Yoshi's team locally handling our needs but other peeps should be aware what support is provided by the bitmaintech.com
Also in contact with Sharif he knows very well about this situation. Hope there will be an update soon.


Mate if a company wants to get rid of warranty obligations it will find how to do it. You describe just one way to do it.
So actually some people like me and other loyal customers of bitmaintech.com will have problems and losses handling with that approach.
One thing I know for sure - with this strategy of handling its customers it will loose customers in geometric progression, and go down soon or later, this or the other way. So it a coin with both sides.

The complaint is valid regardless of where the rigs went.
Lack of communication from Bitmain China.

There are many, many, people who have experienced much higher failure rates than with any other products purchased from Bitmain.
If this is denied by anyone, you haven't been paying attention and reading your fellow bitcointalk user posts.

Stop with the strawmen and recognize the real problems. A serious lack of communication when it comes to warranty service.

My reply here is not about whether or not the OP did something which creates a situation where the warranty no longer applies. If that is the case he should have been told when it was determined.
My reply here is not regarding the OP creating multiple tickets and this causing an issue with "spam", if that is the case he could have easily been instructed how it should be handled, IE one ticket per machine, one ticket with a list of everything, whatever.
We are not even bringing up the violations of cgminer and how disrespectful that action is not only against CK and Kano, not only against every miner here, but against every person creating open source software.
We aren't talking about this complete stinking POS firmware released which makes the fans ramp up and down without manual settings and not to mention the ridiculous other items such as start up "auto-tune"
We can place all of that aside and address the fundamental basic issues of not only this OP but ALL of the others. The true premise of all of the comments and threads regarding the S9, Bitmain customer service, and the way warranty is handled.

My reply is as simple as everyone else who has complained. A lack of communication and a customer service experience so negative you may not calculate ROI based on a functioning unit. You must calculate the ROI adding a ridiculous amount of down time and in many cases simply adding in the average repair price of approximately 20 to 30% of the hashboards purchased.

We have Phil who is one of the most respected miners here in the hardware community expressing these basic complaints.
Tupsu obviously purchases more mining equipment than the majority of us "home miners". Evaluate his situation.

The list goes on, and on of people in this community repeating the same experience with warranty service through China: A serious lack of customer service.

Personally, I have went through several hash board failures and an IO/control board failure. I bought and replaced both boards as a set to avoid any more down time to swap one of those two boards once I received replacements. I simply wanted the unit running again, and I will troubleshoot it the next time I must pull a unit down.

I read a post by a miner at Kano.is the other day which made a great deal of sense and is almost the exact way I have been doing things since my original S4 issues from early last year. Do not use a mining calculator and throw an estimate of how much money you think you can get for the miner when selling. Look at performance, down time, warranty repair costs, and how much time you personally spent troubleshooting each piece of mining hardware. Track all of these things for every miner through this generation. If you cannot recall or put together anything up to this point then definitely begin doing so today. With bitcoin mining past performance is not an indicator of future performance. However, when dealing with a company who has consistently given its customers a big FU in so many different ways the past performance is a huge indicator of what there is to expect.

For the people banging on the OP about all sorts of other items, ahem Dogie, get back to the real points such as failure rates and warranty complaints. Complaints centered around the fact there is a problem with receiving reasonable customer service replies and just as or sincerely more important the true cost of the failures and how they impact your bottom line.

After living this personally for such a long time now it is obvious there are many others experiencing the same or similar FUBAR scenario of the S9 who either don't know or don't care for the continued stress enough to come here and complain. If they do lurk here for information they see people at this for much longer than themselves, people who have grown more tolerant because of the alternative. What alternative? Pay more for Avalon's latest, hope someone like sidehack to get chips and have the opportunity to bring a product to market in a sensitive time frame, move to mining alts, or simply stop mining. Personally, I have not purchased another S9 and have zero intentions of doing so. I picked up my last two from someone most if not all of us consider a respected community leader and I have no doubts he treated me fair, but the fact that I had another hash board failure in one of those units has cost me the profit. An extra $200.00 simply destroys the chance to make enough coin to buy more mining hardware, much less make anything. If I was in it to eat next week I would be very hungry.

The real TL;DR here is Bitmain customer service has not advanced, it has become increasingly worse, and the failure rates of S9 miners are unacceptable.



 

No, its not. Bitmain can't break privacy to counteract the OP's points so he's free to lie and make them look bad when in fact he's not even remotely correct. Bitmain HAVE engaged with him, and now he's just spamming a sob story to try and force them to do something.

Your assuming they give a fuck......

1.They are the ONLY ones selling miners right now.(And for the foreseeable future,next 3-6 months)
2.You home/small data center miners are just small potatoes.
3.It will soon be over cause no one else will be selling any miners,oh wait Avalon will be.Bitmain is soooo scared of them & Bitfury LMAO!!!!

They aren't going to be hurt by you guys not buying their miners,they have plenty of customers,large & small,without you  ;)

not anymore

U funny  :D

I'll hold my breath  ;D

Bitmain will undercut anyone selling miners & you guys will keep buying from them no matter what  :D

This is not an issue with one person or one problem. If you have such breadth of knowledge regarding Bitmain products, specifically the S9, then you would easily recognize the issues people have and are experiencing.
How many S9s do you have running which are owned solely by you in your immediate care?

Regarding your statements and opinions about Bitmain products and other people's issues there are several items people should take in consideration. You have been a consistent shill for Bitmain for a long time. Bitmain kicked you to the curb and Yoshi laughed about many of your statements, told us no one should ever accept anything you said regarding service information or attempt to go through you for help with service information. This was stated in so many words in public on this forum through one of the bitmainwarranty accounts and in an email to me by Yoshi. I have previously posted about this. These are facts.
 
In my opinion your statements on anything other than extremely basic items equivalent to what is found in the manual are the only thing a new miners should take under consideration because you argue things beyond your depth of experience. You simply fabricate and then proceed to argue the most basic electrical knowledge. Stick to copying and formatting things from the manual.

As an example of your thought structure the statement I quoted of yours above is a contradiction. If privacy was not violated where is your proof he lied and is incorrect?   

Personally, again this is my opinion as I do not have proof, but I believe you use these threads in an attempt to better your relationship with Bitmain and again attempt to show you are an asset because you defend their problems in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Again, if there was not an issue (with hash boards for example) there would not be so many people complaining about the amount of failures.

Is it possible for you to elaborate on your current involvement in bitcoin miners and explain why people should believe the claims you made not just in this thread but in general? For example, what is your day to day with mining equipment? Do you have a 10, 15, 50+ miner investment where you are personally responsible? Or, is more of your time spent in the loan-shark side of the business and selling gear to people? Do you still receive free equipment which you use to produce your so called "reviews"? Which by the way, the "reviews" are not proper "reviews" they are unboxing threads with pictures. There is a huge difference. Do you sell that equipment to others? IF so, how much time do you spend with a piece of equipment? What type of torture tests have you done with an S9?

If you wish to reply then please, reply to each point. Picking one point is lazy. Otherwise, simply not replying would be best.

Hi fellas :)

Finally in this new year an update in my case :  situation mentioned in this topic is 90% solved.
After long negotiation process that lasted over 4 month and dozens of thickets, main quantity of warranty parcels was picked up and repaired.
I also did receive major quantity back in the end of January 2017, except the ones that were not repairable.
Was charged for for some part, but most of gear went for warranty cost free repair.
So received atm: 10 s9 boards from early batches and about 30 s7 boards.
what a relief    :D

Meanwhile had a really big fall of hashboards from November batches - 20-25% of bad gear. Had one day in January when received 32 bad hashbards and 9 controllers from one of our facilities, so actually total quantity of gear in service even raised. We will see how service will handle it.

And of course happy bitmain FINALLY made a step forward to their customers providing the new the new 180 day warranty period bcs the previous 90 day period was just funny..not even 1/4 of ROI