So I recently ran into an issue with some keys (primarily D) being intermittently unresponsive. I did my due diligence ahead of contacting support. Factory reset, etc..
So then I contacted support@keychron.com on the 21st of September, making sure it was their website, and not just a retailer as sometimes happens.
I get my first reply on the 3rd of October asking for an order number, which I thought was a little odd. So I provided my order number for a local retailer where I bought the keyboard, mentioning that I know this order number will be useless to them, but whatever, feel free to have it.
I get a reply today saying the following:
Thanks for coming back to us! You may need to contact the seller for more support if the item is not bought from our website www.keychron.com. Please kindly note that the warranty is provided by the seller. For more details please kindly refer to https://www.keychron.com/pages/warranty.
Let us know when there is anything we could be of help.
Thank you,
Keychron Team
tl;dr: Do Keychron just not provide support for their products at all, or am I missing something huge here? I can't think of a single hardware manufacturer who's outright refused to provide support for a product of theirs because I didn't buy directly from them, and need their support who have detailed knowledge of the hardware.
That's not the norm in the computer industry at all though, is it?
Hardware manufacturers pretty much always offer support. You always (at least in most countries) have the option of leaning on the seller, but I genuinely can't say I've ever encountered a hardware manufacturer who doesn't offer support for their product regardless of where you bought it.
And since I would like to figure out the issue I'm having instead of just getting a replacement and creating some unnecessary waste from an otherwise perfectly functional keyboard, I feel like it's justified to be weirded out by them refusing to offer support for a product they've specifically made their profit on already.
I do agree its odd, but not all companies have transferable warranties if sold by a 3rd party vendor that does not sell a product officially. Some also require purchase receipt ontop of the SN.
Companies that do serial number only tend to have product support whenever because the warranty activated when the first official sale of the product happened.
Some outright reject if youre not the original owner (e.g for GPUs, plenty, Nvidia themselves, Sapphire, XFX, Zotac). Asus and Gigabyte off the top of my head requires original purchase receipt (so effectively non transferable unless you are the official original owner or the original official owner gave you a copy of its original receipt)