QA/QC is very expensive, especially for low volume. You send something out to a customer, they claim its broken, you ship out a replacement at your expense, maybe the customer eventually sends back the broken one, then it sits on the shelf for 2 years because you don't have the manpower to do a root cause investigation. Now you've sold 300 units and have replaced 50 of these and you have no idea why they're broken, what went wrong, and have to a a full validation of each one from scratch. Most of them seem to work fine in your test lab (maybe it was the customer's fault? But maybe your design is incompatible with their production environment?) and the rest all have unique problems which each take 1-5 full days of investigation to nail down a root cause.
Maybe 2-3 share a single root cause, and it's not clear how you'd prevent this from happening in the future.
If you're shipping large volumes, this can add 10% to the MSRP, but if you're shipping low volumes, $50-100/hr of weeklong diagnosis and investigation can easily add 50-300% to the price of each unit.
And that's if everything else is going perfectly. Which means you lucked out and found an amazing Chinese contract manufacturer who works with you hand-in-hand to fix any design bugs and manufacturing issues, and ensure parts availability.
If you're doing such low volume, yet your service and customer relations is based on big corp style, sure you're going to have big problems.
If you sell only 300 of something, and returns are coming in, you should be figuring out why ASAP. And probably talking to the people before they attempt to send it back.
That's pretty much what they are saying as far as I can tell? My experience is pretty similar to theirs, root cause analysis takes a lot of time per device, and there's rarely once single failure cause for all of them.
Maybe 2-3 share a single root cause, and it's not clear how you'd prevent this from happening in the future.
If you're shipping large volumes, this can add 10% to the MSRP, but if you're shipping low volumes, $50-100/hr of weeklong diagnosis and investigation can easily add 50-300% to the price of each unit.
And that's if everything else is going perfectly. Which means you lucked out and found an amazing Chinese contract manufacturer who works with you hand-in-hand to fix any design bugs and manufacturing issues, and ensure parts availability.