What problem will you meet with after purchased GPS trackers?
There was a customer, who imported a batch of GPS trackers and used them for a period of time, but he wanted to transfer the GPS trackers to his own tracking platform, but the supplier did not cooperate with him. Moreover, their products were also very expensive, and the customer had to buy high-priced products from them all the time because of their dependence on the tracking platform. From this case, we can see that the supplier is not active in solving the after-sales problems, or plays fast and loose, which will undoubtedly cause huge losses to the purchaser. Therefore, as the purchaser, we must know what problem you will meet with after purchased GPS trackers. In this way, we can avoid the loss in time.
GPS trackers, like other products, have some hardware issues. While the hardware issues are not the main problems, but the software tracking platforms.
- What are the majorhardware issuesof GPS trackers?
With the development of this industry, the hardware and firmware design resources are almost under sharing environment. No matter big or small companies, they can make out relatively stable products. The factor that impacts on the quality of product is how to save the cost. Big company has the advantage in sales quantity, so they have the ability to keep IC component in a certain sale, and can request financial support from supplier by credit terms. While small company may simply compromise to the IC component price, for example, they may choose cheaper IC or second hand materials. No matter what materials they are using in product, it won’t affect too much in the performance of product, while only affect the product’s life. As we can image, there are won’t much hardware or firmware problem currently except the device was coincidently under the faulty rate of production, artificial damaged without carefully checking instructions or accidents.
We can see if you find any of the devices is not working properly, you should firstly check the parameters like APN, Server IP and Port, and ID are configured correctly or not, if all parameters are fine, then you can check the connection of each wire and antennas. To the worse situation, you may then confirm if the device is burnt or damaged.
- After-sales pain point of GPS tracker lies in the softwareplatform.
Even though there is faulty rate in product hardware. We may get one or two or few devices faulty. Or Even though there is artificial damage, we may finally get few devices broken and then avoid it happens again. But if software platform have issue, your entire purchased devices won’t work. In spite of the development of the industry, the researching ability in software platform is still uneven. Due to the software platform hosting cost is increasing (because map is not free during these years), a lot of software platform suppliers are going to charging the service fee, and they are trying to use the software platform to bind the customer future business.
A lot of the customers may be afflicted by platform issue in this business. Because when you start the business, you may not have enough fund to host your own server platform, and choose to using the supplier’s, while later you want to host your own server, the supplier refuse to move your devices, and force you to order more and continue in paying service for their platform. In this case, we may need to know how to avoid this platform issue becoming your bottleneck. Please check our suggestions below:
1) Confirm with supplier whether the GPS tracker can be configured with different server IP and port and its SMS command.
2) Confirm with supplier whether the GPS tracker can be configured with ID or using device’s own IMEI number and its SMS command for configuring ID or acquiring IMEI number.
3) Request the communication protocol of the GPS tracker from supplier.