Poor Customer Service Issue - Selling refurbished units at Retail

Bought and installed a Ring Spotlight Camera from Lowes over weekend. Mounted, installed, ran cable through attic and installed a new plug for it. In trying to add to our Ring account, it wouldnt work. Called Ring Customer Service and was told the camera (by mac address) was installed on someone elses account, even thought it was all new packaging. End of the day, Ring stated it was a refurbished unit and was still installed on someone elses account. My two options: wait 15 days and hope the previous owner deactivated it from their account. If not, I have to return to Lowes for exchange. Option 2 - return now. I expressed my discontent after having installed it through the attic, in the soffit, etc. I asked why Ring was shipping refurbished merchandise to Lowes - rep didnt know. Lowes manager was certainly unhappy about it. He said they do not sell refurbished mdse, but apparently Ring snuck this in on them, in what appeared to be new packaging, all hardware packages sealed, etc. No indication it was refurbished. So I had to uninstall, remove it and return. Complete disaster of customer service. Ring has no way to deactivate it from the original purchasers account so the new customer gets to uninstall, return and reinstall. Pretty poor customer service that they are shipping refurbished units to stores without their knowledge. Always had good luck with Ring customer service but this was a complete fail. Lowes was pretty apologetic even though this wasnt their fault. Having retailers sell refurbished merchandise at full price, without their knowledge with no indication to consumer is bad business. If you know someone else installed it and know it’s on their account, and repackaged and shipped to retail to re-sell, what did you think would happen. New customer cant add to their account! Advice to Ring - deceptive business practices unless this is the “one” refurbished unit that was sent to retail, but I doubt it. Good thing I didnt have anything to do other than install two of these this weekend because you cant delete it from someones account, even after you had me provide emails with receipt, product packaging, serial numbers etc. Need a better system to control this…

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Hi @swtexas. I’m sorry to hear about the experience you had with purchasing your Ring Spotlight Camera at Lowes. Refurbished units would not be shipped to an official retailer to be sold as new, so this was likely a mix-up at Lowes with a unit that was returned and accidentally mixed in with the new and unopened devices. If you have any further questions or concerns with your new Spotlight Cam, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team a call at one of the numbers available here so they can help find a solution. If you are outside of the US, please visit here to see how to contact support.