Cherrypal is probably the only major laptop vendor being accused of scam. How so?

First, when we started shipping Cherrypal Africas in December of last year we ran into a couple of unforeseeable problems, or rather surprises. I will get to this later.

Second, we have been told repeatedly when a company promotes Africa and in particular does business with countries like Nigeria it can only be scam. The fact that we accept Western Union payments is supposedly already proof of attempted scam. We literally receive hundreds of hate emails every day that condemn our decision to call the little $99 laptop “Africa”.

Third, I made myself available to bloggers of relatively unknown sites as well. When I turned down their request to provide free review units the tone of their coverage became obviously hostile. In one case I had to send a cease and desist warning since the accusations were without any substance and didn’t represent in any way what I had mentioned in interviews.

Let me get back to the “December” issues though. We here call it the “underwear” crises.

We launched the Cherrypal Africa December 15^th and had sufficient inventory for the first batch of customers, at least that’s what we thought. The first daily shipping batches were handled by a shipping company in Shenzhen, China. The basic idea was to send out the Cherrypal Africas from our Hong Kong warehouse to customers worldwide in order to save shipping cost. The cost for shipping we published was (and is) US$18.80 per laptop, regardless of location. We sent our shipping broker the placed orders on a daily basis. The agreement was that they would ship the same day and provide tracking numbers immediately after. So far so good. It took us four weeks until we found out that the shipping company actually didn’t ship the laptops to our customers, they sold them in Mainland China to their own distribution channels. During this nerve-wrecking four weeks some of our customers got faked tracking numbers, others cheap underwear, others nothing at all. Only after we got the first emails from “customers” in China praising our laptops we found out what was really going on. We had to cancel all impacted orders, and left a number of surprised and frustrated customers behind. The “underwear” crisis obviously almost killed us, but we rolled up our sleeves and tried to make up for the loss in confidence. To the best of our knowledge all impacted customers have either received their Cherrypals or got refunded by now.

What’s the conclusion of the “underwear” crisis? Unfortunately huge financial damage, the “Cherrypal Scam” rumor was born, and even worse a number of disappointed customers in doubt. On the other hand, we are a recognized brand in Mainland China now (pardon my sarcasm).

During the crisis demand didn’t really suffer on a global basis, but we are annoyed that we have ever been accused of scam. The objective of the Cherrypal product line was to make inexpensive and low-power consuming laptops available to a new group of customers worldwide, a segment in the market that wasn’t able to afford a laptop before – and we succeeded! Suppose that’s what matters most.

Where are we today. Orders for customers who reside in the States get shipped the same day if we receive payment confirmation (Credit Card, Western Union, bank wire transfer, check) before 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Also, US orders get shipped out of our US warehouses and usually arrive within 2 to 3 days. For customers who live outside of the US we still ship out of Hong Kong, delivery time is about one week to 10 days. We are using a different shipping company now

Last but not least, when I put on fresh underwear every morning I get painfully reminded of who I should trust and do business with. However, it also puts a smile on my face When I read all the encouraging responses from customers and NGO groups about the impact our little Africas have made I smile even more. It was worth the pain.