The ever vigilant “The Register” carries a story today about on-line retail E-Buyer which appears to have muddled up the batch numbers on hard-drives they bought for resale and hard-drives that were for OEM (original equipment manufacturer)  installations. The full story can be found here, on el Reg.

The nub of the issue is that the warranty conditions for Seagate OEM drives are substantially different for drives purchased seperate to other equipment. EBuyer claimed a 5 year warranty for the drives, but customers who checked on Seagate’s validation site found that the warranty they had was only 1 year.

The information they had failed to meet the expectation of customers. One theory put forward in the story on The Register is that ebuyer mixed up their batches of OEM and consumer hard-drives, which apparently can happen if you are buying in bulk.  Other less honourable theories were also put forward…

It appears that ebuyer will have to carry the cost of honouring the 5 year warranty claimed for the drives sold.  This is the cost to them of non-quality in the information they used to manage their business which resulted in the wrong drives being sold under the wrong warranty.

 One wonders if ebuyer will review their processes for how they handle their inventory records to ensure that this type of error doesn’t happen again?