Put yourself in his shoes for a minute and imagine thinking you're helping people out by offering a great value on a decent Chinese amp and subs counting on volume to actually turn a profit. Now you're automatically attracting the absolute bottom of the barrel for buyers. Guys like Papermaker are literally geniuses by comparison to who that guy has to deal with day and night.
Figure dozens of times a day someone wires up power and ground in reverse, shorts speaker terminals, wires down to 1/4 ohm, spills beer into the amp.... you name it, then they call/email him with "I don't know what happened, it was working fine then just blew up".
Endless stupid questions and people trying to defraud him and probably 100 other nickel and dimers trying to haggle on something that's already WalMart priced. Meanwhile, like I said, after his operating expense, legit factory defects, plus any other returns/warranties he has to eat he is really probably lucky to make 20$ per amp and he still has bills to pay, likely works 60+ hour weeks, doesn't know the definition of the phrase "day off".
There's a reason all these newbie companies who come out the gate with an inexpensive product wind up raising the price 50-70% when and if they actually manage to stay afloat for half a year, and the reason is that there's more "cost" in selling this stuff and you can't just add 20% to whatever China charges you for the equipment and stay in business.
When you get a snappy answer from someone running a small business, consider for a moment that's probably the 100th time this week he has had to waste his time replying to the same stupid question and he's probably inches away from driving a box truck through a crowd of people. Or all you guys who are butthurt can cob together your money and buy a shipping container full of Chinese amps yourselves and try to deal with the car audio marketplace. I wager few of the people who criticize this would fare any better after a year or two actually trying to deal with what those guys have to put up with.
Or complain until he goes out of business and the next guy will fill the niche; losing money or breaking even and treating everyone like gold for a year or two until he burns out and looses his cool on someone. Rinse and repeat.
100%.
We have to weed through people trying to defraud us, our dealers, being false vendors wanting new business, then the customer base illegally using their bank and paypal's policies maliciously to try and get free products through us or our dealers because we are contracted by several companies to be the only authorized importer for said brands, etc..
We get it, there is only one source and it's harder to manipulate that source and dealers to get what you want for black market prices but the more it happens, the stronger we get and the more aggressive our tactics get.
It's funny in the end on some occasions where an honest customer gets shut down with a canceled order due to suspicious contact information, address, context of conversations, etc... When it's a mistake.
But it's better to be safe than sorry.
This year alone, we have won every chargeback ever filed against us due to people trying to scam us.
We have had to get Paypal pay US back personally out of their own money from claims filed that satisfied the buyer protection but still would favor the seller in a court of law. Those are interesting to say the least..
We get people who buy our products to contact us back 2 months later asking if we would buy it back from them because they want to change to something else..
I can keep going and going.. But the matter is and many better or should understand this very clearly.
We may all be buddy buddy online, at shows, etc..
But..
All of us companies are BUSINESSES.
When a customer makes a transaction, it's no longer "buddy buddy", it's business.
Many people tend to forget or misunderstand why one's "tone" changes from talking about a product to then buying it.
Anyone caught lying, stealing, etc, We have Zero Tolerance.
Our policy is simple-
People who fall under that is permanently blacklisted from not only all the brands we import but the list is sent to all of our dealers and they have a choice to blacklist them from all of the brands they sell as well.
Mess up once bad and it can have permanent consequences for your audio addiction.
We used to be a customer a long time ago and know how it feels to get what you want after working forever to get it.
We see all these threads of people lying and getting their money and products from people illegally.
We put our foot down 2 years ago to stop any further actions from anyone who tries that with us or our team.
This was to further expand on what hispls was saying but we continuously expand our anti-fraud screens to continue business while still staying a public business.
Business is no joke compared to what customers have to watch out for.