My bad experience buying a new phone from t-mobile.

[7Priest7]

T-Mobile claims to be changing the game by allowing you to either pay in full or pay over time.

T-Mobile places a full retial price of $240 on the LG Optimus F3.
That is a reasonable $40 dollar markup from amazons price.

I went in friday with $280 in hand ready to buy the phone.
They wanted to charge me a additional fee for paying in full or something.
They wanted nearly $300, Seriously... WTF!!!

I expected it to be about $250-$260 with taxes.
In the end I turned $200 of that into a vanilla visa and ordered from amazon.

If you think you are gonna get a fair price when paying T-Mobile in full, forget it, they have additional fees for non-debters.

 

[mogelijk]

The extra fee should only be if you aren't on a postpaid plan. From what I know, there are likely two reasons for the extra fee. One reason is because of phone resellers, who typically buy phones from US carriers and then sell them overseas (where they cost more). The other reason, and the more important reason (I'm sure), is that for some reason T-Mobile seems to be wanting to push their prepaid customers onto their no-contract postpaid plans.

 

[7Priest7]

I would never go back to postapaid.
Postpaid has WAY too many taxes/fees.

All they did is rob themselves of the markup/profit on the phone.

 

[mogelijk]

Postpaid, at least on T-Mobile is a mixed bag. Yes, you are paying perhaps $10 more (at least when including sales tax on the prepaid rates). OTOH, you are getting data roaming, a larger roaming service area, possibly higher call/data priority, tethering, and other things that aren't available (or, like tethering, only legally available if you pay extra) on prepaid. So, yes, you are paying more but you are also getting more for the money you pay. Not to mention prepaid often is on a 30-day "month", meaning you have to pay for an extra 5 days a year, while postpaid is actually monthly.

As for T-Mobile losing the mark up/profit on the phone, they seem to be ok with that. I think they'd even argue that they aren't actually losing any money by not selling the phone. Especially in prepaid, there are carriers like Virgin Mobile/Boost and Cricket that will discount their phone prices in order to sell the phones, knowing customers will have a difficult time trying to use the phone elsewhere, and that they can make the money back on their monthly fees.

Having said all this, I am frustrated by the way T-Mobile is treating their prepaid customers -- as I said before, they seem to want to push people to postpaid. This is among the reasons that I have, at least temporarily, left T-Mobile.

 

[SEMIJim]

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[mogelijk]

Why should they be interested in pushing customers to post-paid? What gain, for them?

I was on pre-paid this last month. We're moving to post-paid. I haven't gotten any impression from T-Mobile that they particularly care.

Jim

This is assuming I am correct that they are trying to push prepaid customers to postpaid. My assumption is based on how they are charging extra, as this thread complains about, for prepaid phones versus postpaid phones that you buy outright. It is also based on how T-Mobile is "hiding" their prepaid webpages; it seems like they have no links from their main webpage to their prepaid pages, instead you basically have to know to go to t-mobile.com/prepaid.

As for why, I have a few thoughts as to what the reasons might be but really have no clue. First would be that they likely make more money on postpaid. In this case, the problem would be that a significant percentage of prepaid users are on the $30 plan which makes them almost no money (I'd be interested to see the percentages). Along with that is the extra cost of having postpaid and prepaid plans that are very similar, including the same price point ($50/60/70) but that have to be managed separately, causing extra costs.

Another thought is that the postpaid plans are a bit harder to quit. With prepaid, a customer just needs to change the SIM in his phone to his new carrier and quit paying T-Mobile, and he has successfully "quit". With postpaid, you have to actually contact T-Mobile and quit your plan, as well as pay your final bill. I'm guessing that postpaid has much higher retention rates than prepaid, so moving customers to postpaid helps them "lock in" customers.

I'm also starting to wonder (I have no evidence of this, just speculation) if T-Mobile wants to close their pre-paid business, and instead use MetroPCS to run their prepaid (much like Sprint does with Virgin Mobile and Boost). Since MetroPCS has the same plans for $10 cheaper, and only does prepaid, this would allow T-Mobile to shut down the $30 plan (or move it to MetroPCS) but still have lower prices for prepaid customers. My guess is, if this happens, it will likely happen after MetroPCS has shut down their CDMA network.

 

[SEMIJim]

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