Hi;
I am considering making a purchase from Thestationonline, what had happened that you would not deal with them again?
Should I just not deal with them?
Thanks
Jeff
I would avoid dealing with them, personally.
What happened?
I was purchasing my first arcade game, before I found KLOV.
They had a Spy Hunter; I wanted it and I knew nothing about video games back then other than I'd played them BITD and wanted one. It never occurred to me that collector groups like KLOV existed or these could be found in multiple places.
Anyway, called and talked to them at length; they had the game; they'd been an op and these were their games they'd had on route; they knew everything there was to know about the games, they were willing to guarantee that the game would be operating *100% correctly* when it arrived here and they'd back it up with technical support after the sale. I put the "working 100% correctly" clause in the additional terms of the sale that we both agreed to in the Ebay transaction.
So it took them 30 days for them to ship the game (which was ridiculous). Then it showed up and there was no Peter Gunn theme. And there was a loud hummmmmmm that came from the speakers when it played. And the shifter didn't work right some of the time. And it wouldn't save high scores or the configuration settings. Half the weapons lights wouldn't come on. And there were a host of other smaller problems as well.
Their excuse for the ridiculously long ship time was that they were going over it carefully to make sure everything was 100% perfect before it shipped. But it showed up with extremely obvious electronic problems.
Then the fun really began. They had me open the game up and look for the connections to the cheap squeak card and sure enough, one of the connectors had been carefully removed and tucked away. They told me to connect it but when I did the game would no longer boot. It had been obviously disconnected because the game was unplayable otherwise. They agreed to send me another CSD card if I returned this one to them. I mailed the old one back (my expense); they sent theirs COD and in a large priority box that stuck me with about $22-$25 in shipping to receive it. (Mine cost about $7 to ship to them). They blamed customers on their route for disconnecting the cable ("sometimes they get in there and do stuff like that if the music is too loud"). I asked them if they gave their customers keys to the cabinets but they didn't want to pursue that discussion.
New CSD card didn't work either.
They didn't know what to do remotely to fix this; they offered to fix it for free if I paid to ship the game back to them. (Yeah, right). I asked them if they were willing to pay to have the game shipped back to them since it clearly wasn't 100% working as agreed to in our ebay purchase agreement. They weren't interested in that.
Finally I found someone locally to come look at the game and they agreed to pay for half his rates. (They should have paid for 100% of his rates). He came out and found that the CSD card was bad, the lamp driver board was bad, they'd hacked the wiring harness to within an inch of its life (they found the wrong voltages on the wrong lines), the microswitch was bad in the shifter, they'd hacked in a switcher in place of the linear power board, etc.
Basically the game was a mess and their claims of exhaustive testing and 100% working were ludicrous.
So it came time to pay for all of the bad components; local repair guy offered me surprisingly good prices for tested working components and I bit. (These were KLOV prices; installed in the game and demonstrated working).
I negotiated back and forth with the Station to cover the repair costs; they had me box all of the bad parts back and ship them back to them for "inspection" (another $20-$25 in shipping) before they'd consider paying for them.
Then they basically jerked me around with one ridiculous message after another (although they did admit that their technician who certified the game as 100% working had never worked on the older MCR games before) and they offered me something like $25 to go away. Of course they never sent any money at all and for $25 I basically told them I would give them negative feedback on Ebay. And I did.
Reading some of the other comments shortly afterward shows that I wasn't the only one that was having issues with them.
The transaction was a nightmare from start to finish. It's obviously your call if you deal with them but I'd *never* consider buying anything from them again.