At Seleventh Fitness Store the vast majority of our fitness and gym equipment (such as treadmills and cross trainers) is sold with an onsite warranty. This basically means if your equipment develops a fault, we will send an engineer to your home to fix it without fuss.
Over the past few years, many new websites selling home and commercial gym equipment (such as exercise bikes and rowing machines) can be found on the internet. Many of these e-tailers are just individuals setting up a business from home, and some are not even limited companies. In some instances, this may appear to be good news for customers as this will provide a wider choice of equipment. Whilst this may be true there are also many disadvantages to you the buyer.
As more new e-tailer businesses are set up, they each strive to offer inferior and less expensive home and commercial exercise equipment products. More often than not, the products are “grey imports” bought in direct from Chinese manufacturers and are not well established high-street brands. These products may well appear cheaper spec for spec. However, they may well turn out to be a costly mistake.
When buying home or commercial gym equipment from web-only companies, be particularly wary of warranties they offer. Always ask what warranty is provided with the equipment and what level of customer service they have. If the exercise equipment comes with a “back to base” warranty, find out who will pay the carriage to return the equipment to base and who pays the carriage to ship the repaired model back to your home address (as carriage charges can be considerably high).
Our customer-first ethos is rarely given by “internet only” companies whom, in many cases, operate from home, small offices or industrial units with little or no physical contact with the products or indeed customers. Staff of internet fitness companies will seldom be aware of the true differences between the wide choice of gym equipment models and brands and have probably never seen, let alone tried out the products.
