Resellers often have headaches with faulty batteries.

Be it from a cell phone or a laptop, the battery and the charger are often the first things to become faulty and cause a great deal of ‘heat’ between customers and the people who sell them the products online.

And now portable DVD players are adding fuel to the fire.

Companies including Toshiba, Polaroid, Thomson, Disney, Welkin, Mintek Digital and Coby are only a few of the big brand name companies that have been hit with battery and adapter problems lately. With batteries overheating and exploding or faulty adaptors causing electrical fires there’s no surprise that customers are getting hot under the collar.

Collectively more than 300,000 portable DVD players, or DVD player components, have been recalled tarring the image of big name players.

And what’s worse for eBay resellers selling China wholesale electronics is that the potential backlash for them is bigger.

EBay resellers offering Chinese brand electronics online already have to fight customer skepticism of buying online, and buying something from a brand they don’t know.

And even though big name brands and Chinese name brands are usually manufactured in the same country the name helps ‘ease the customers’ mind, even though they are paying two to three times the amount for a gadget that is the same, or sometimes inferior to a ‘no-name’ product.

So if a batch of products you are selling does turn out to be faulty it can be incredibly damaging to your store because customers are usually pretty quick to go online and post negative comments and ratings about your store.

But the news is not all bad, and if handled correctly you can actually turn a disaster into a customer relations victory.

The secret is just to be proactive.

If you know that some of your products are faulty you should immediately:

- Talk to your customers about the problem

- Offer product recall and replacement

- Post details of the defect on your store and other public locations

- Provide information on brands with similar problems

But that doesn’t mean that you should just wait around and cope with the problem when it happens, in fact with a little sourcing work you could completely negate the issue.

If you are reseller it is impossible to find the time to check every single Portable DVD manufacturer or check the quality of the battery of every single unit that you sell but you can still take precautions.

One precaution you should definitely take is to ensure that the drop-shipper that you are using carries out their own testing and stands behind their products with delivery and manufacturers guarantees.

This means that even if there is a problem they will carry the costs so you won’t have to foot the bill.

Another method is to teach your customers the correct ways to maintain and charge your batteries. That way they will prevent fires with their portable DVD players.

Don’t just deal with a faulty battery situation when it happens set out your emergency plans now and take steps to prevent it happening by informing your customers and being a little bit more careful with your sourcing.

By doing that you won’t only be protecting your bottom line you will be increasing your stock with customers and lifting the number of customers you get in the long run.