I bought a Longines Mini on January 13. 2025. It is costing me extra money to have bought online from Juwelier van Willegen.
1) I was sold a watch that was not working when I received it. The reply was to tell me to get a brand new watch repaired. My mistake here was to not just return it.
2) It turned out to probably be the battery. It was changed, the watch worked and I had to personally pay for a new battery for a brand new watch.
3) It is now, again, not working. I have gone back to the local dealer of Longines as Juwelier van Willegen told me to and, yes, they will send it for repair. But they will charge me €80 to send it there. Buying a watch online and buying it from them has given me a broken watch and is turning out to cost me a fair amount of extra money.
I sent this for preview to Juwelier van Willegen. This is their reply. No help whatsoever:
"We fully understand that the local dealer needs to charge a fee for handling the shipment and insurance — especially when they were not the original seller. However, we were genuinely surprised by the height of that fee. If someone were to approach us with a warranty case for a watch not purchased through our store, we would also charge a handling fee, but certainly nothing close to €80.
Once again, our sincere apologies that we did not offer you the second option to send the watch back to us so we could handle the warranty claim directly, or even consider a replacement given that the watch was brand new. In hindsight, that would clearly have been the better route.
Unfortunately, your experience has already been tainted by these complications, and we regret that very much. Of course, you are entirely free to share your review we only hope that, especially in light of the many positive experiences others have had, it will be clear that this was a truly exceptional case.
We have an average customer rating of 9.8 based on over 665 reviews, and we work very hard every day to earn and maintain that level of trus
