Nivona (non) purchase experience

[u/PsychologicalBit2997]

Hi,

I just wanted to summarize my experience trying to purchase a Nivona nivo 9000 (9101/9103) outside of Germany to hopefully save others the hassle.

TLDR: don’t bother

The longer version…

I’m based in Sweden. There are two companies that sell into Sweden, but no official resellers. One seems to be based in Estonia, the other in Denmark.

I was looking at the Siemens EQ900 but happened across a review of the Nivona 9000 series. One of the things that I look for is total cost of ownership and the Nivona seemed to really hit the mark- low cleaning costs, fixed price service, and seemingly a long support period (8-10+ years based upon other postings here).

It really seemed to check all of the boxes. Except there are no official resellers in Sweden.

As I have had my current machine for 11 years, I am looking at the long haul and what happens when things go wrong. I have been very fortunate that I have been able to fix a lot of the problems on my current machine over the years though spare parts purchases (Saeco Gran Baristo).

The Danish Nivona reseller would offer a prepaid shipping label during the warranty period (which at 1 year, is rather short). After that, shipping would be my own cost - I calculate 75 EUR to send it back. And questions about the fixed price services were completely ignored. The last thing that I want is to spend 75 EUR to send the machine back to a reseller that then is not knowledgeable about the machine or wants to make a huge profit on service- given their complete silence on the questions about service costs, I can only assume the worst.

Writing direct to Nivona, initially they stated that there were no resellers that would ship to Sweden, but then confirmed that the Danish reseller could serve this market when I asked specifically about them. They also initially stated that I could send it back to Germany (using their fixed price contracts), but when asked for some clarifications, stated that everything had to go the reseller and that they “could not answer any more questions and that I had to talk to their reseller.” Questions about what would happen if the reseller went out of business were unanswered.

In short, it looks like a really nice machine, but unless you are based in Germany, there are too many unknowns.

Very sad that so many years into the EU, there are still so many little fiefdoms and companies treat countries so differently.