How Dell LatAm pushes buyers towards Samsung, Acer

20 Oct 2007 | 19:01 BST

By Fernando Cassia

DELL HAS great hardware, but after a recent experience trying to order a LCD display for my home office on the firm's web site, and then on the phone, I'm now looking at Samsung and Acer as my only options.

Yes, Dell hardware is top notch, and its pricing is hard to beat. But there are some glaring omissions in the web ordering process, and small annoyances that make a local customer if not suspicious at least a bit wary.

Once I added the LCD monitor, I noticed something odd, the shopping cart showed quantity one of "LCD monitors, wide screen" with no reference to the model number. Second, the numbers used the American notation, that is $1,247.11 instead of $1.247,11 which is the local notation, using dots for thousands separation. Of course, no big deal, but those little details are what make the local customer feel from the start that they're dealing with a foreign company far away. "If they don't know how to write prices, what else don't they know about us?"

But more important than these little details was the reference to taxes and import duties. At the top of the screen, a blurb read "Your Price", followed by the following statement: (literal translation) "Price of purchases $1,508.80* Price in Argentina Pesos. The price includes shipping and import duties. Includes VAT". The latter was in red and bold typeface.

But below, "shipping and duties" was marked as "Not Available ††" and the footnote read: "This configuration is presented only for your convenience. Prices are subject to change without previous notice. PRICES DO NOT INCLUDE SHIPPING, OR IMPORT DUTIES. SALES TAX [they surely mean VAT?] IS INCLUDED. The final prices including import duties, shipping cost, and sales tax will be communicated after we have received your on-line order." So there you have, two conflicting statements on the same page.

Notice that the green button to continue at that point is entitled "Order here ". How was I supposed to order something if I don't know the total cost in advance?. Actually, if what that button does is send a Request for Price, it should be labelled as such. I decided to check on the terms and conditions on that page to see if I could cancel an order after receiving the order confirmation and finding the final price would be totally out of my budget. What I found was confirmation of why most U.S. companies that come down here and just copy their US web site and business model fail miserably (Home Depot, AT&T failures come to mind).

Dell should bear in mind that what separates its Round Rock, Texas headquarters from Buenos Aires is much more than 5161 miles or 8306 Kilometres, it's language as well. When you read the Terms and Conditions page it's evident that they just translated the U.S. legalese document, something I will find funny being applied to a local sale to a local customer by a local business - as is Dell Argentina. The result is sometimes worrying, sometimes funny, and sometimes tragic.

This document in Spanish and under the "Dell Argentina" section heading reads [original in all caps]: "This agreement and any sales subject to it will be ruled by laws of the State of Texas, regardless of any other rule to resolve conflicts of law". Now let me get this straight.. Dell Argentina as a local branch is a local business, located with a physical address in Buenos Aires and its own Argentine tax ID number 30-70719843-3. So how could the laws of Texas apply to a local sale by a local customer with a local business registered in Argentina is beyond me.

I'd like to see the face of a local judge being explained by a Dell representative that the customer, by placing an on-line order, agreed to subject himself to the laws of Texas - or the face of a Texas judge being brought a case by a customer in Argentina against Dell's Argentinian branch.

Point number three is probably just to scare you into prompt payment, but reads: "The customer agrees to pay interests over any owed amounts, at the highest interest rate allowed by law". Not nice, Dell! Why not say something subtler like "twice the average interest rate". In short: I couldn't find an answer to my question... Would I be able to cancel an order if the price I received by e-mail was totally unacceptable?

The joy in that document continued: "Changes: Occasionally, Dell can, at its sole discretion, change products or pieces of a product". I think they must mean "replace" and "replacements" in the English original. In any case, the current Spanish document might make some people think that Dell can change a system or parts of it from your order without previous notice. Not something very enticing for someone who's having doubts about making his first on-line order.

A later statement is less ambiguous but not less scary: "Dell can revise and discontinue products at any time without previous notice. Dell will send products which have the power and functionality of the products ordered, but it's possible that there might be changes between what is shipped and what is described in the catalogue pages." This is followed by this orchestral ending: "Dell does not accept nor does it assume any responsibility besides the remedies outlined herein".

I suggest the company changes it to: "You have no rights, we have the final say. Ha-ha!"

OK, before the nitpickers flame me, I know that all similar legal documents look as outrageous as this one, it's just that very few people read them, what I'm trying to say is that I was forced to read it because I wasn't told during the order process whether what I was entering was a firm order or a request for pricing - remember, import duties were shown as unknown and the final price was thus a big question mark in the air.

"Price includes duties". "Does not include duties!" All very clear...

So I tried Dell Argentina's local toll-free number. What I got was a sales girl speaking in Central American - Puerto Rico?- Spanish, which doesn't sound at all like the Rioplatense Spanish we speak down here. Again: is Dell trying to make local customers confident or scare them? I explained to the girl that I wanted to know the final cost of a given Dell LCD monitor and that the web site wasn't telling me the import duties, and that no way was I going to enter an order without knowing that in advance.

I was asked the model number ... and everything went well until I said the last "W " in the model number. We call the W "double V". In other countries that also speak Spanish it's named as in English, "double U". The girl asked several times "double V?" I realised what was going on ... but decided to play "dumb local" and NOT correct my speaking to impersonate a Central American.

After all, why should a buyer change the way he speaks when trying to buy something over the phone, if he's calling a local number? The poor girl was probably typing "VV" at the end of the model number and not a "W". Not my problem! She told me to wait and put me on hold. Then suddenly I found myself back at the IVR menu! - For PC orders press one... for accessories, two.. etc. Sheesh. I hung up in outrage.

Free advice for Dell (I'm getting a bit tired of giving free advice for corporations which should know better and probably pay more per month to expensive advisers than my yearly salary.)

1. Total cost, please. If you have an ordering web site, either calculate import duties and display the amount, or, if the order is just a request for pricing, make the button one must click on read as such and not " order". People - like this scribbler - will wonder if pressing the green button would mean entering an order and then having the legal obligation to pay whatever total price is them e-mailed for the item. Not good!

2. The Call Centre. I don't care if you choose to serve Venezuela, Colombia, and the whole Central America from a call centre in Panama or Puerto Rico, but while our language is still in theory Spanish, it sounds different. It would be akin to Dell taking US orders from a London - or Sydney - call centre. Besides, there's a booming call centre industry in Argentina, so why not answer all local orders from a local call centre? So you know, the person on the other side can understand that when I say "doble ve" I mean "W" not "VV".

3. Meaningless Legalese: aka "Texas Laws, we couldn't care less." For Heaven's sake, have your legalese document checked by a local attorney and translated to the local legal mumbo-jumbo. Make the references to the corporation read your local branch, not the Texas HQ. After all, customers are buying from Dell Argentina, not Dell Texas.

4. No stocks I know this probably goes against your efficiency and cost-cutting dogma, but how about having a little local inventory as "buffer" between orders and new shipments from Brazil, the US or Asia? At least for items that do not change and cannot be customised, like LCD screens. Would Dell go broke by having 10, 20 units of each model in a warehouse somewhere and ordering more as each one from the local inventory is sold? There have been plenty of complaints on web sites and the local blogosphere about people waiting 30 days - some claim even 75 days - awaiting their purchases.

According to users, Dell sometimes blames it on the customs, which I find a bit hard to believe if you hire a competent customs broker, considering I personally paid duties and retrieved a purchase shipped by UPS and held at the customs depots in about six hours - believe me, this is fast by local standards. Plus, a couple of days of strikes at the customs surely cannot amount to a 40 days wait for some people.

This is far from a personal rant. A blogger over here liked his new Dell notebook but also shares my comment about the Central-American Spanish: "Even while they generally are able to answer questions, they have a different Spanish, and sometimes it gets though to understand. To make things worse the whole thing uses VOIP so conversations do not have much sound quality."

While I was writing this, I spotted great deals from both Samsung and Acer, in the same price range as the Dell I planned to buy. And I can go to a store and check them out, hold them in my hand. Of course, these two companies have a different strategy. Acer and Samsung rely on sales channels, while others like Philips have factories in Argentina's far south Tierra del Fuego which manufacture some product lines locally - getting tax breaks and contributing to local employment in the process.

Dell instead has apparently chosen the maximum-profit, minimum-risk, no-stocks, "quickly-translate the US-web-site" and " route -calls-to-an-overseas-call-centre" approach, and that approach has a price for the company in terms of customers annoyed or lost, like me.

I think that distances for reaching South America are much greater than shipping within the U.S. in order for the custom-systems-imported-across-the-world to work reliably. I planned to order a Dell. Now, I've narrowed my choices to either Samsung or Acer. Will Dell Latin America learn something from all this? How about copying other retail efforts elsewhere? In short: Why can't Texas learn from the Chaebol, the Dutch, the Taiwanese, etc? µ

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007