Razer Return Process

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I bought a Razer Mamba Wireless on 1-5-2021. It was a gamer mouse.

In August of 2021, a weird thing happened to the mouse. It would work perfectly fine when not plugged in, i.e. using wireless. And then I'd plug it in, it would charge and show all of its fancy g4m3r LEDs -- but it would not allow me to actually use the mouse. No motion on the screen whatsoever.

Pretty strange issue.

I'm not a stranger to troubleshooting stuff, so I tried a few things, but no dice. Given the product was within warranty, I opted to contact Razer support.

Cue the kafkaesque nightmare. It took nearly two months to sort out. There were probably 50 replies back and forth between myself and the Razer support technicians, culminating in telling me my issue is non-reproducible and would be closed. To which I said... "no."

Support emails

Their suggested troubleshooting steps included restoring my PC to factory settings. However, I had already tried the mouse on my Mac machine -- to the very same trouble. Worked on wireless, didn't work when wired up.

So I'm not really sure how a hardware issue clearly relegated to the mouse and reproducible across two entirely different systems would be resolved by restoring just the Windows PC. Sense: it doesn't make any.

No, thank you.

Yeah, yeah, I get it -- that's boilerplate and the customer service representatives aren't paid to think deeply about a singular return case. But still. But still! #firstworldwhining

Other minor annoyances included:

  • They didn't thread their emails, hence why I have a stack of 33 separate emails.
  • I seemed to get different customer service representatives with every response, so I believe on one or two occasions, I had to repeat steps or re-hash info I'd already given.
  • They required a signature for my warranty replacement mouse (y tho. My taxes don't even come signature required...).

I did eventually get a new mouse in October of 2021, after having spent the entirety of September fighting with the Razer support technicians. The Mamba was out of production at that point, so I got a Razer Basilisk Ultimate instead. It was cool of them to offer the upgrade.

I've done a few returns in my day. Particularly with Logitech, the return process was breezy and painless. By contrast, the Razer process felt pretty much designed to cause as much friction and pain as possible.

Based solely on the return process, I can't say I'd recommend Razer products. That said -- I do have a SeirenX microphone that has lasted at least six years and seems to be of fairly high audio quality. No complaints there, but the weird mouse issue and the tangled nightmare of a return process has me shying away from future Razer purchases.