Powernotebooks.com Out of Business Today - No Laptop, No Refund!

This is my first post on the Forum, I wish it was a more positive one. So, after much deliberation on who to purchase my son's new gaming laptop from I settled on Powernotebooks.com. I made this decision after carefully reading reviews on multiple forums and review sites. When I ordered I even dealt directly with Donald the owner and his wife. They were very professional and nice to deal with. They took my order and communicated quickly with my bank and received payment for a new Sager gaming rig for nearly $1500.00. I woke this morning to a email from [email protected] telling me they were going out of business and would be unable to fulfill my order. This would have not been a huge problem. I understand that businesses go out of business eventually. But, the kicker was it also informed me that they would not be refunding me my payment. They regretted that I would have to follow up with my payment provider to get my money back. I emailed and called and no response was made. I had to file a fraud claim with my bank to try and retrieve my funds. I again understand that health issues arise that are unavoidable. But, you can not tell me that 7 days ago when I spoke to them and they graciously took my money that they did not know they were closing. I wanted to give my business to a smaller American family owned business, I guess I should have gone with a bigger company. Not refunding someone that sum of money with a simple we are sorry is not acceptable. No response or follow up to my emails and making me waste my business day trying to recover my money is terrible way to close your doors Powernotebooks! I will be filing a consumer complaint with the Federal Trade Commission as well. Shame on you!

 

hey ScubaSteve, I'm moving your thread to the Sager / Clevo forum as that's where many Powernotebooks.com customers hang out and will better be able to see this. Your news is terrible on all accounts, I hope you are able to retrieve your money in a timely manner, I can't imagine how frustrated you must feel right now. This is where credit card protection is valuable, sometimes it's worth paying a higher price that some small retailers charge to use a credit card and have the ability to deal with fraud very quickly.

 

Indeed, if you used a credit card, a simple charge back and you get your money back. It's a lot harder to do with direct bank transfers.

 

Hi ScubaSteve and all of those who are on the forums here who are reading this.

We will be releasing an official statement and a plan of action for those who ordered Sager laptops via Powernotebooks and are affected. It's a very unfortunate turn of events that none of us were ready for. In the meantime, to anyone who is reading this in the same boat, we urge you to open a charge dispute for your purchase as this is the best recourse you have in getting your money back. We also urge you to hold off on ordering from another reseller just yet as we get some details worked out. Thanks!

 

Very glad that something came up that prevented me from buying my laptop last week. It would have been the 3rd one I've ordered from them. I am sorry that the owners have fallen ill, but they should definitely do the right thing and make sure everyone gets their money back for unprocessed orders.

 

Wow. That's something else indeed.

 

Thanks for the response. I did file a fraud claim with my bank. I did use a Visa card, so they are confident I will be reimbursed. It is more the point of the matter and the wasted time. Not to mention the disappointment for my son. I will wait to order from another vendor until the money has been credited. I will still be looking to get him a Sager!

 

I am another that's also affected. Although I should be happy about it in a way, gave me time to rethink my purchase and I decided to get another laptop completely. Check out this reddit page, lots of detail in it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/comments/40sl0d/meta_powernotebooks_has_closed_shop_and/

 

Wow. So there is a reason why their ebay listing on GPU heatsink for just 30+$ is closed.
I hope nobody did direct bank transfer to them, really.

 

bummer well, welcome back to regular user-dom then, @Meaker

 

Not like Meaker had special permissions before, I think. They never added a "company representative" tag since Xenforo.

Entirely off topic, but why a Sager? I would likely suggest Clevo almost no matter what someone's desires in a laptop are (excepting those who would bank on eGPU solutions heavily etc) but what about a Mythlogic or Eurocom? Is it a matter of cost?

 

I think it's because people don't know about resellers like Mythlogic or Eurocom. I found Eurocom by accident once when I was looking to buy a Clevo laptop, bit the bullet and decided to order from them and I was so glad I did. I knew about the really popular resellers like Pro-Star and XoticPC but none of them offered 120 Hz screens, only Eurocom did.

 

Maybe. I'm just curious though.

 

Now I'm glad I didn't buy from them, although they were one of the first I was considering. I hope everything is resolved well for everyone affected, and wish the owners well in the future. I think the main reason I didn't buy from them was I couldn't get more of a barebones unit, or at least get a lower-end CPU. I ended up buying a Clevo from another seller, and put in a Core i3 purchased from a major online computer retailer.
Anyway, I got a couple issues with my Clevo, for example backlight brightness keys not working, WiFi not working unless within 0.1 meter of the router's antenna, maybe 1 or 2 other things, but this thread is probably not the place to go into detail. If/when I get around to it I may post another thread. (I am planning to make a couple upgrades in the next few months which may hopefully solve a few other things.)

 

Never a good thing to see a company close up shop, especially one as highly regarded as PNB. Though not recently, my family and I did purchase a couple systems from them, one of which is still going strong today.

 

Extremely unprofessional though, and dishonest. They clearly knew what was going to happen, yet they continued to take orders (and people's money) as if all was well.

Their communications have clearly stated they will not be fulfilling orders, nor refunding anybody's money.

 

I'm seeing that now and have edited my post. I don't understand why they wouldn't just refund people, since I have to think it would cost them more to bring credit card companies into the mix.

Regardless, that's shady as heck. Folks with credit cards hopefully won't have too much of a problem, especially when you present them with evidence that the company has no intention of fulfilling the order, and their website is for all intents and purposes shut down. But anyone who paid by cash or check? Who knows what recourse they might have?

 

I was contacted today by a Sager rep. Very happy to see that Sager is trying to assist in this situation. I will most likely deal directly with Sager after retrieving my funds. I did file a complaint with the FTC last night as well and encourage everyone else affected to do the same. I spoke to both Donald and his wife on the phone on January 5th several times. We talked about good business practices and the personal attention you get from a smaller family owned American business. They had to know that they were closing the whole time they were talking with me. This was flat out deception to take peoples money before they filed bankruptcy. I do not know what their situation is exactly, but to flat out steal peoples money like this is criminal and I hope it is investigated.

 

We wanted to respond to the unexpected bankruptcy of powernotebooks.com. This development took us as much by surprise as you. We found out through the same E-Mail that was send by Powernotebooks to customers, and were finally contacted by Powernotebooks later in the day. They have given us what they represent as a list of unpaid pending orders. We are going to reach out to the individuals on the list, but given the circumstances, we are obviously concerned it may not be complete. If you were affected, please contact us at [email protected] or call via one of our toll free: (800) 669-1624 Tel: (626) 964-8682 and have a receipt or proof of purchase ready. While we will not be able to issue refunds for units we did not sell, we do want to help customers who are affected, and will offer a discount to those who were affected.

We advise those of you who are affected to quickly contact your credit card company or service you used for payment (e.g., PayPal) and dispute the charge. As with all units, we will honor Sager warranties for laptops resold through PowerNotebooks.


Below is an FAQ put together our friend SagerTwitter who manages our unofficial social media accounts.


Will you offer refunds for my order?

"Unfortunately, Powernotebooks was a third party reseller, as are all of our resellers. We do not receive payment unless an order is made by the reseller. Therefore, we cannot refund an order that was not made through us. However, we are offering a discount to those affected. Contact us via one of our numbers,Toll Free: (800) 669-1624 Tel: (626) 964-8682 or email [email protected] and ask for support on suspended Powernotebooks orders. Please have a receipt or proof of purchase ready. We will confirm whether the order was received or not and discuss how much we can discount from there. We also recommend getting a charge dispute in order before calling us. Look at the question below for more details."


I placed an order with Powernotebooks and now I've lost money. What can I do?

"Dispute your charges as soon as possible with whatever method of payment you used to pay for the order (i.e. If you paid by card, talk to your card distributor, Paypal, talk to Paypal, etc.). We also recommend taking up a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), found here to make the FTC aware of the situation. This may also help in recovering your funds, but there is no guarantee."

Did you know about this?
"Nope! We found out at the same time as everyone else and were just as surprised."


Will you be honoring my warranty that I had with my Powernotebooks Sager order?
"If you bought your Sager laptop from Powernotebooks, the warranty should be a Sager warranty, so we will honor that. We are not aware of any extended warranties offered by Powernotebooks themselves for Sager notebooks besides our own. If you have questions about your warranty, contact us via phone"

Why did Powernotebooks close?
"They have stated that their owners are suffering from health problems due to the job and age, so they decided to close their doors."

 

If this ain't called scamming, I don't know what this is... They knew they were going out of business and still took people's money! I hope nobody loses out from this! My prayers with all of you!

 

Well, many businesses would be already a bancrupcies if they were saying to their potential customers something like "We are currently in a bad shape and can close doors if we don't get orders on XXXXX$ amount by the end of this week so lease buy something". I am pretty sure they knew how desperate situation it was but they made the final step in about 2-3 days before the end, that's what I think.

Really bad. But... business is business. I bet it's legal if they make it look right.

 

Does anyone know if what they did was illegal? That's seriously such a disgusting scam, I'm shocked..

 

Please lets not have any resellers in this thread as Sager said they will be trying to help as best they can. We don't want this terrible situation to be made into an opportunity to advertise. Thanks.

 

Man, this kinda reminds me of how the former Sager reseller in Singapore shut down too years ago.

I got my stuff nicely and even managed to get repairs in the same year (yeah, bad luck was bad). And then in that same year too, they disappeared in a similar manner like this (which means new customers did not get their machines or in some rare cases, refunds. In my case, I lost two years of warranty)!

Thankfully Sager/Clevo machines are one of the most serviceable laptops ever on the market, and with the right service manuals I managed to fix other issues that cropped up much later!

 

Still awful. Another thread may be set up as to whom to buy from instead.

 

Will warranties be covered for sager components recently purchased through powernotebooks?

Example batteries?

 

All warranties were through Sager to begin with, nothing changes in regards to the warranty.

 

A bit off topic, but what happens if a Clevo reseller (not Sager) goes out of business? Will Clevo handle all warranty requests and other issues?

 

Europe has quiet a few importer, but all European systems can be serviced through Clevo's (outsourced/contracted) service center in Germany/UK during their warranty period.
Even if a company goes bankrupt they still service them...

In North America all systems come through only a handful of larger importer (like Sager) and usually those will honor the warranty even if the systems where bought through one of their re-seller under a different brand.
But here it is more on a case to case basis.

 

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Agreed. This was as close to it as can be, because these two people as owners didn't reach this quick conclusion to shut down operations overnight, as it seems to indicate by press reports.
They had known about this for more than a month, but kept it themselves, and didn't bother to notify any of their personnel there.
I have been in constant contact with them (Donald in tech support) as recent as 2 1/2 weeks ago, and neither he nor anyone else (Nita in Phone support) had said anything to me about any planned shutdown of operations.
I am just happy as a clam that I didn't go through with my plans of getting a new Laptop from them as I had wanted to at the start of the year, because I just saved myself a whole hell of a lot of money in this scam.

 

I do hope those of you who had orders in get your money back. I will say this though about the owners.

In 2012 I ordered a new Sager (my second), but the model got delayed and pushed back for months. I came upon some legal hassles,
and asked for a refund which they cheerfully gave me along with best wishes to resolve it. A couple years later after the dust settled, I ordered a
new laptop from them again (MSI this time, the GT80 had a 18" screen, 2 gfx cards and was top of the heap at the time). Don helped me learn what was what in the new market.

I got my laptop, everything was handled with what appeared to be their usual good service that they built their business on for years.

If Don & Charlotte were overcome with medical issues, knowing Don is 71 I figure its probably pretty bad. They really weren't the type of people to grab other's money and run
they didn't build or run their business that way over the many years they operated. It probably is devastating to them after all that effort to have it end in the manner it did.

But most likely, they didn't end it gently because they were unable to. Life doesn't always let you.

I pray that they are able to recover, and I quite certain that given the kind of people they were based from my experience with them and talking to Don several times
that this was far from intentional.

Ideally the money you all put forth in the course of the business gets returned to you, chances are they weren't planning to shut down when this came upon them.
The nature of finanacial transactions in a business is that some orders would be between receipt and placement, and it sucks if you got caught in that.

God Bless them, they did try to do their best from all I've ever seen up to this point.

 

I will miss PNB. I bought a total of 4 systems from them and had nothing but great experiences with them.