Starting Jan 1, 2017, HolidayCoro moved from a standard warranty on all controllers to an variable warranty based on customer choice. Those choices are:
- No Warranty - the controller is sold as-is and without any warranty
- 1 Year Warranty
- 3 Year Warranty
HolidayCoro has sold dumb and pixel controllers for a fair number of years now and as such, we have extensive data on failure rates both natural (factory) and customer induced failures. The following is the 2016 breakdown for warranty claims for AlphaPix controllers:
- 98.6% of controllers sold never resulted in a warranty claim that required a replacement or repair of the controller
- Of these claims, .03%, the root cause is un-determined or believed to be factory defective
- Of these remaining claims, 1.37%, the root cause is traced back to customer induced damage (mis-wiring, mis-handling, static damage, shorting, water damage, etc)
- The cost to replace a controller is generally $47 in labor and shipping to process the repair and when a controller is repairable our repair costs are typically around $14 per controller (2017 costs)
- An estimated 6% of total controllers sales result in a support ticket that is resolve-able with replacement of either an output chip or fuse and did not result in a completely failed unit. Troubleshooting labor for these issues runs typically from $5 to $80 depending on the complexity of the troubleshooting.
There were a number of drivers on why we switched to a customer choice model of warranty:
- Most of our competitors do not have stated warranties or they do not have a warranty - this is with US and foreign vendors. For vendors without a stated warranty, the vendor can decide if they want to or not want to repair or replace a controller and there is also no clear documented warranty process - some will pay shipping costs, others will not (HolidayCoro pays shipping both ways on controller warranties). As HolidayCoro is contractually obligated by our credit card processing provider to provide a stated warranty terms on all items we sell, so we are unable to leave our warranty terms "open ended" as most smaller vendors are able to do.
- Customers have demanded lower and lower prices and it is not possible to remove costs from the base product and the major cost outside of the hardware is warranty and support costs.
- We believe in customers having the option to make informed choices on their own based on their skills and experience.
When we implemented our new warranty process, we lowered the price of the controllers to "subtract out" the warranty costs - so if a customer is purchasing a controller and adds the warranty to the product, that price no different than the original price of the unit when it was sold with bundled warranty.
We should note that controllers sold with and without a warranty are exactly the same controllers. 100% of our controllers undergo full testing for all outputs (SPI, DMX, Fan, etc) and 100% are burned in for 24 hours as shown below:
 
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