Consumers

We at Yarraa wish you and yours a happy Chinese New Year! If you're taking it easy for the long weekend, don't forget it's not too late to Yarraa the television, DVD player or home computer with which you'll be spending time. Best wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2010 for you and all your purchases!

Do you know how many items I buy that include warranties? Almost everything. Warranty cards everywhere and never a one gets mailed!

If I were a competent consumer, I would complete each card, make a copy of it, and file it somewhere for easy retrieval in my time of need.

Of course, I'm not a competent consumer. However, I am an irritated one when something goes awry with my treadmill, dishwasher or microwave and I haven't mailed nor can I even find my warranty information.

Then I'm calling, searching on line, going from the retailer to the manufacturer to the distributer trying to discover if my item is covered (The store clerks can be unreliable about that, you know.) All the while, my item still won't function.

Then I stumbled across this site called Yarraa- Your After Sales Whiz. I'm just starting out on it, but it appears I can record all my warrantee info on there.

For Free.

I can even go back and record old purchases. Yarraa does all the rest of the work.

It appears it does more than that, so I'll be checking all that out, soon.

You know it has happened to you: a sweet piece of electronic equipment or a shiny new appliance breaks down, the buttons quit working or the machine stops humming. Good thing that most major purchases come with a manufacturer’s warranty, a slip of paper that just might save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars, a slip of paper that contains all of your purchase information, a slip of paper that will save you hours of hassle and headache.

Now, where did you put that slip of paper?

If you are like the average American consumer, once your purchase is out of the Styrofoam packaging and assembled, you recycle the box and then stick that important paper….somewhere. In a drawer? Under a cabinet? In a “safe place?”

We all know the quickest way to lose something is to put it in a “safe place,” and now because you lost your warranty card, you will face hours of wrangling between the store where you bought the item and the manufacturer.

But what if you had put your warranty information in a truly “safe place” and could access all of your purchase data at the touch of a button?

Yarraa.com is this safe place, one you will not forget about. Yarraa.com will keep track of all your important purchase documents so you don’t have to; all you have to do is upload the information once and the system will keep track of warranty information for you, and will also provide information about repair services, product updates, and possible recalls.

Next time put your purchase information in a truly safe place- put it in the hands of Yarraa.com.

During a round of Christmas shopping last night, I was once again reminded of one of the more common misperceptions about Yarraa that I run into. While my shopping companion was looking at different brands of a common household item for a Christmas present, she asked me which brands she could Yarraa. "Is this brand a member? What about this one?"

It doesn't matter!

I'm doing my best to make sure all your favorite brands of electronics, kitchen appliances, power tools and all other warranty-eligible items are Yarraa members. That will, of course, enable you to register your warranties at point of sale and have all your products secured by Yarraa without you having to enter any information. But until we reach that rather lofty goal, remember: you can always register your products on Yarraa, whether the producer or retailer is a member or not! All you need is your serial number, brand name, model name or number and product type. If the company is a member, you'll enter your serial number and find the rest of the information waiting there for you. If not, the only difference is that you'll have to enter the remaining information yourself. When you send in the warranty card (or register the warranty online at the brand's website), you can enter the warranty number and length on Yarraa as well.

In fact, if you want to encourage your favorite brands to join Yarraa, one way you can help encourage them to do that is to register your purchases on Yarraa yourself. The more of their products there are registered with Yarraa, the more attractive our after-sales services and solutions will be to them! So don't worry about who is and isn't a member. Just register all your purchases, and we'll take care of the rest.

Chances are it has happened to you at some point, or someday it will. You search high and low for that extremely popular new electronic toy your niece or nephew or your friends' kids want, which is impossible to find wherever they live. For whatever reason, it is available where you live, and you buy it, box it and mail it off. You're a hero!

Until the day after Christmas, anyhow, when you call to see how your gift went over with the kids. Well, their mom or dad says, thanks for trying, but I'm afraid it got banged around too much in the mail. It didn't work.

You're sorry, of course. But you're not done. You know how things can get knocked around in the mail, and how fragile electronic toys can be. That's why you registered the gift with Yarraa before you mailed it. Never fear, you tell your friend or relative, I'll see this is taken care of.

Off to the computer you go, and in a matter of minutes you've found a list of service centres in the city where your friends or relatives live. Fill in a service request, provide the address and a contact number, click Submit, and you're done! Soon, the poor kid's parents will be contacted with arrangements to collect the item and fix it, with no hassling on their part because you've already provided the warranty information through Yarraa.

The gift might be a few days late for Christmas, but it will be working soon enough. You're a hero, again. You're welcome.

I was sick last week. Never a fun experience, but it did give me a thought on the value of Yarraa.

While on sick leave from work, I passed my time by working on my laptop computer and listening to CDs on my portable radio. In the heat of a Singapore midday, I kept cool with my air conditioner (not too cool, of course, since I was sick). Meanwhile, I was also able to keep up a modicum of comfort with tea from my electric water heater and soup heated on the stove. And I kept in touch with the office as necessary by my hand phone. Now, what if any of those had broken down? Never a fun experience, of course, but trying to make sense of what to do through the fatigue of a cold and the fog of cold medicine? While I was depending on those items to help me through the already-miserable illness? Think of the last time you were sick - how would you like to have to figure out how to get your computer fixed while you were in that state?

As we come up on cold-and-flu season, and especially with the threat of H1N1 in the background, remember, with Yarraa, you're only ever a click away from getting help. So you can concentrate on getting healthy again and staying that way, no matter what else life throws at you in the meantime.

If you were at SITEX, you know it was very noisy and crowded. While our event staff did a great job of reaching out to consumers, they may have misheard your name or misread it on the registration form you filled out. If you have since logged into your brand new Yarraa account and found that we misspelled your name, I apologize for the error.

But I'll do more than just apologize. I'll show you how you can fix our mistakes!

Just log into your Yarraa account. When you come to your My Products page, click on Setup. This will take you to your Profile page, where you can update and edit almost all your personal information - including your name! On this page, you can also add your telephone number and address, and even upload a picture to customize your Yarraa page. (It will appear in the upper right-hand corner of your page). Just click Submit and the changes will take effect.

The only thing you cannot change is your e-mail address. Speaking of which, if you registered with us at SITEX but haven't received an e-mail with your login and password, we may have entered the wrong e-mail address under your name. If you think this may have happened, just e-mail us at hr-AT-yarraa.com and we'll see to it that the error is corrected. Thank you for your patience!

After a long but exhilarating weekend, we at Yarraa would like to say thanks to everybody who helped make SITEX a smashing success for one and all!

Over the course of four days, we got to talk to thousands of people from all over Singapore, Asia and the world. Well over a thousand of them created Yarraa accounts and safeguarded their new purchases immediately with our secure after-purchase resources. Four lucky new Yarraa members won our lucky draw for a new HP Netbook.

Congratulations to Pin Xian Hoe, our first lucky draw winner!

But here at Yarraa, we feel like the winners as well: we had a chance to reach out to a lot of new partners and consumers. Soon you can expect to see more and better services from us thanks to the contacts we made at SITEX.

Be sure to visit our display next time we come to a trade show near you – you could be the next lucky draw winner! And you’ll definitely have the chance to hear a lot more about what Yarraa can do for you.

Okay, I admit it: you can't Yarraa a turkey. But you can Yarraa the freezer you keep it in, the oven you cook it in, the blender you use for your cranberry sauce and before-dinner drinks, the mixer you use for your mashed potatoes, the microwave you heat up the appetizers with, the toaster oven you use to heat up the bread, the telephone you use to give Uncle Charlie last minute directions to your house, the refrigerator where you'll keep the leftovers, the dishwasher that will be overflowing with plates and glasses later on, the garbage disposal you'll inevitably need for whatever the kids didn't want to eat, the television you watch football on after dinner, and the CD player the teenagers in your family listen to instead if they don't like football. The last thing you need to worry about on Thanksgiving is how to get any of the above fixed - and with Yarraa, you won't have to! That's one more thing you can give thanks for this year.

All my friends know I like to take pictures; they’ve been victim to my pointed lens at too many inopportune moments. They also know that when it comes to digital equipment, I am, in their terms, “unlucky.” When my dual-lens panoramic digital camera died, I missed out on an awesome 1-year warranty that would’ve repaired my camera for free. Believe me, if I had thought of it, I would have used it faster than you could’ve said, “Klutz,” me cackling and beaming in absolute delight the whole time.

My dad, who had bought me the camera, reminded me of the warranty after I had bought a cheaper replacement with less memory, less gigapixels, and less zoom. I sighed, regretted buying the replacement—but we couldn’t find the piece of paper with all the warranty information anyway. My free camera repair was lost amongst all the papers I had probably thrown out when we moved from our old house.

Yarraa remembers all the warranty information for you. Once you’ve filled in all the necessary information, you don’t need to keep track of the warranty paper anymore. All the information you’d need—the warranty number, the bill number, the length of time, and the warranty provider—will be stored on the Yarraa site, untouchable by tidy, well-meaning roommates.

My current camera’s warranty is safely stored on yarraa.com, and it doesn’t matter that I have no idea where the paper or box went. Just glancing at my consumer homepage lets me see how long much longer I have to use my warranty. Yarraa even stores a scanned image of the receipt for me, just in case someone wants to contest my purchase.

If my current camera breaks down, I know I can find and use my warranty easily and be a little less unlucky with my digital equipment.

There are so many benefits to a site like Yarraa.com, including the fact that it helps those of us that are extremely disorganized keep it together by tracking things we might normally misplace, like warranties and receipts. However, one of my favorite features of the site appeals to the side of me that is constantly on the wrong end of the customer service spectrum.

The Yarraa.com service request section is such a great feature for anyone who has spent hours ---literally --- on the other end of the phone, appealing to a completely unsympathetic customer service representative to help with a service issue. This can be so irritating when all you want to do is be able to drop off the item in question at the nearest service center for any necessary repairs.

Well, now you can save your phone rage for another matter, because Yarraa.com offers a service specifically aimed at helping people like you --- and me – to navigate through this frustrating process. You can use Yarraa to contact a service center and essentially do the requisite haggling for you. All you to do is look under the listing of your products on the Yarraa site and submit a service quest, listing the problem and choosing from nearby service centers. Who knew it could be so simple to get service request done without having to take an entire day off of work to do it?

The best part is that when you arrive at the service center, they will already have the information needed to address the problem for your product. However, if you don’t see a nearby service center listed, you may have to contact it directly and make arrangements, all the while encouraging them to become part of the Yarraa network.

Again, though, this is where Yarraa makes your life easier because let’s say you don’t know where in the heck to find a service center; Yarraa will help you find one through a very detailed map of your area, with authorized and unauthorized service centers.

I am all for anything that not only helps me find things easily online, but also helps me avoid those uncomfortable phone calls with customer service reps that seem more interested in arguing the details of my warranty and what I “might have done to the product” than helping me to fix it. This is just another component of Yarraa that helps the entire site stand out as a must-have for those into life organization of any kind.

There are a few necessary traits to be a successful business owner, manager or CEO. You have to be somewhat of a skeptic, but you definitely need to keep abreast of upcoming trends and what the big players are doing.

Yarraa offers one of those hot business services that will catch on big. The concept of reverse logistics is very appealing to retailers. Utilizing the power of the internet, this service can not only make the lives of owners, upper management, and staff less stressful, it can streamline the operations of a business. However, it's easy to ask what the catch is when you hear that Yarraa is free for both your customers and your business.

Their website isn't flashy. In fact, it seems fairly straight forward and user friendly - but what will likely catch your eye is the "who's who" of recognizable household brand names flashing across the screen at the bottom. From Sony Erickson and Samsung to Cuisinart, any skeptic will be impressed. If these lists of high ranking “satisfied customers” are using Yarraa, then maybe you should be.

Make the simple step of registering your business and join a growing group of forward thinking retailers and product manufacturers who are partnering with Yarraa to provide a better service for customers.

 Sometimes I contact a customer-service center, talk with a representative, and get confirmation that s/he will deal with my problem. OK, fine. Hours pass . . . then weeks . . . then sometimes even months. By that time, I’ve probably forgotten about my initial request, since there’s really no efficient way to track it, and I’m likely no longer a high priority on the service center’s Fix-It list.

But not anymore! When I use Yarraa to submit and track my service requests, it does all the work for me. If I want to know how long it’s been since I asked for that broken blender to be fixed, it can tell me exactly when I submitted my request and what the status is. Honestly, that’s so much better than calling a 1-800 number every time I have a question about my product . . . and it lets me be that much closer to having delicious smoothies again!

I like to say, "Things break around me" more than I'd like to admit, "I break things because I'm an absent-minded klutz." Regardless, I end up with damaged items: I've broken several cell phones while climbing, running, diving, etc. My latest digital camera has developed a focusing problem. So far only my camcorder has survived abuse, but mainly because I've begun to rein in my belief that cement is softer than it looks.

Now, if I had known about Yarraa back when I purchased my first generation of cell phones and digital cameras, I could've probably saved myself some time and embarrassment when searching for help and explaining the damage.

Yarraa is an online service where you can plug in-say, your camera's-vital information for future accidents or unexplainable breakdowns. Signing up is a cinch; you just need an email address and you're ready to start extending the lifetime of your delicate material possessions.

With the serial number, product type, brand, and model you inputted earlier, Yarraa will find you a repair store, and it will even provide you a map of its location. All you need to do is select a product you've registered, click on Service Request, and everything you need to know for a repair order is right there: the sneaky serial number that nobody's willing to memorize and a list of repair services in your zip code area.

This may not be stunning for people who know repair services for each of their possessions off the top of their heads-but there's an element of convenience for them, too. If that particular repair service is registered with Yarraa, you can send them a damage description straight from the Service Request tab. That way, helping hands aware of your injured item's history and present condition will be waiting when you arrive.

A product breaks and you need the receipt and warranty information for a return. But you haven’t kept your paperwork organized. Instead, you’re buried elbow-deep in yellowed papers, the ink faded beyond legibility. You’re not even sure if you kept the receipt.

You squint at the date and product name on a crumpled register receipt, sigh, and toss it aside. You’ll get to filing them later, when you’re not in a time crunch. Did you buy your iPod at Best Buy or the Apple store? If only you could remember.

Filing receipts is often the last task on a busy person’s to-do list, which often means it doesn’t get done. When a product breaks, you pay the price, settling for store credit if you make a return or paying for repairs because you lost the warranty information.

But if you have a computer, Internet access and a scanner or digital camera, the days of searching stacks of papers for an old receipt are over.

Yarraa.com lets you input all your receipt and warranty information, where it is safely stored on Yarraa’s secure servers. You’ll probably find that entering product receipt information is the feature you use most frequently on Yarraa. How do you do it?

Entering product information is easy and intuitive. On the left side of the screen, after you login and “skip introduction,” click the big green button that reads: “Click here to Add Product.”

On the right side of the screen, enter the requested information. Any information with a red star beside it is required information. When you are finished, click “next.” You will now have the opportunity to enter warranty information and to upload a JPG of a receipt – either a scanned image or a photograph.

If you don’t want to do this right away – perhaps you don’t have the extended warranty information in front of you – you can click “submit” and your product will be saved in the database. You can return at any time to edit the information or add more details about your warranty.

You’ll find the process goes quickly if you want to enter a large backlog of receipts so you can file them away in a box or filing cabinet, or even recycle them. Your information is safe on Yarraa.

Now, with all that paper clutter off your desk, don’t you feel better? And, look, there’s that iPod receipt, at the very bottom of the pile.