No Parts Markup

Low cost spares make repairs affordable

Unlike all other domestic appliance brands sold in the UK ISE makes no profit on our spares . This is regardless of if they are supplied under guarantee, or out of guarantee and charged to our agents. This policy has two major benefits.

It encourages us to improve machine reliability - unlike our competitors, who in most cases make more money out of selling parts than they do selling machines, the more reliable our machines are the better, our low cost spares offer savings in the cost of underwriting our guarantees. This makes it in our interest to continually work to understand and rectify problems, constantly looking to upgrade components in order to increase reliability. If like our competitors your profit margins are enhanced through part sales and you have an employed service engineers that need work, what incentive is there to make your appliances more reliable?

High cost spares shorten life spans - as brand owners and huge retailers fight for market share the cost of new machines is being driven down. This makes factories focus on low cost production rather than long life and retailer pressure squeezes margins making brand owners the mark up on parts higher and higher to compensate. These factors have pushed up the price of repairs and extended warranties to the point where enough electrical product to fill Wembley Stadium six times over being scrapped every year in the UK, not because many of the items can not be repaired but because an insurance company or the general public decide it is not economic to do so.

Replacing rather than repairing may be good for retail sales but is bad for the planet, due to increased production volumes and creating unnecessary carbon emission.

To demonstrate the replace versus repair imbalance we have selected four common repairs, bearing replacement, pumps, motors and modules on typical machines on sale today. Any of these components can fail at any time due to wear and tear, blockage or simply a power surge.

Let us take a look at spares prices when you compare them against the cost of a typical machine, with how an ISE5 machine fares at the bottom:

So, for example, in the case of the Indesit example used a drain pump would cost approximately 10% of the total cost of the machine and yet, with ISE, it is a mere 2% of the cost of a replacement machine. 

As can be plainly seen, an ISE machine is substantially cheaper to run in the longer term when it comes to maintenance costs. This in turn makes it far more affordable to have the machine repaired or repair it yourself rather than throwing it away and having the expense of replacing the machine unexpectedly. 

In any event, the cost of four parts alone for many competitors brands exceeds the new cost of a machine, how can that be?

Of course the ISE5 no longer exists but, the same principles apply to the current generation of ISE appliances and, with a ten year warranty, this isn't a concern for a decade but, quite probably more.