The HORROR of Acer Australia and their cashback

Here is the saga of me and my acer cashback, Heres what happened when buying my Acer 2418

I asked the store clerk several times how to claim the cashback and he told me I just needed to go straight the to acer Australia website and thee was a link on the mainpage. When I got it home I had a good look but couldn’t find it, I called the store back and the clerk told me to ring a 1900 number the following day as he didn’t know, I wasn’t really impressed so I range a different branch of the same store and they gave me the address, laughingly telling me that there was no link and the only way to get there was to know the address. So after filling out the form I tried to submit it several times except it kept returning a error, I rang the different branch again and they couldn’t help and gave me a number to call the next day. The next day I called the number to find it was incorrect, I rang them again and spoke to a manager who told me all the barcodes on the boxes were invalid and it had to be organized offline, Somewhat annoyed no one had told me this in the many phone calls I had already made I called acer anyway and spoke to a Indian with a very heavy accent, who gave me a issue number and told me to print out the form and post it off. Finally managing to send it off I was nearly ready to kill someone when I got a email saying “Congratulations!! You’ve swapped your $199 cashback for a extra 2 year warranty!” I called the acer helpline and was on hold for a good 20 minutes before someone picked up, I explained my problem and he went to check, he returned half an hour later and told me I would need to pay a $20 fee to lodge the claim offline, After explaining the situtation he reluctantly agreed to wave the fee.

Now almost 4 months later I contacter Acer wondering why I was yet to recieve a cheque, and I got this Email

"You opted for an additional 12 months
warranty in lieu of a $100 Cashback payment. That is a reason why you have
not received the cheque until now and 27th of january 2007 is estimated
completion date for the program."

Upon recieving this I nearly exploded and have written back a furious email demanding the cheque instantly for the full $199 not the $100 stated in the email as well as some form of compensation for the monumental stuff up, Any ideas on how I can try and turn this situation around?

 

No idea how to help, that's just bad. I'm glad I didn't have any troubles getting the cashback for my Aspire 3002.

 

Sounds awful. Acer support in OZ sux worse than i thought ><;

 

Yeah, It was purchased for my mum and ive kind of been stuck dealing with it.

 

You could threaten to report them to the Australian Better Business Bureau (is it the correct name? lol)...

 

The cashback website is www.acer.com.au/cashback, to which there is no link from the Acer homepage, it seems to be a well hidden industry secret or something.

You might want to appeal to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, they are generally very pro-consumer, although that does vary on a case by case basis.