In this post I will state my overall (negative) experience with Akko Europe and its store akkogear.de, which is still, to this day, unsolved.
Back in April, wanting something more practical than a 60% keyboard, during Easter Sales (or Valentines Day late sales? Can’t remember), I ordered a bundle from akkogear.de containing a 5075S in white and a free 2x 45 switch pack of my choice (see pictures for more details), for a total of about 60€.
Checkout time, first problem occurs. The store prices are without VAT. That brings the total up to 73ish euros and I’m like yeah that sucks but isn’t a dealbreaker at this point.
Fast forward some days, the order is shipped. From China. Expecting a European warehouse from a European store, I’m pretty disappointed but I wait some weeks for the order to get to my house.
A few weeks after, the package is finally there. After building the keyboard with the provided switch in the bundle and a keycaps set of my choice, I encounter the third problem of the bunch.
Remember the title of the product listing of the switches? If not, check the pictures again, especially where there’s the funny word “LUBED”. Exactly, not a single trace of lube is found in those switches, making a supposedly easy keyboard build a nightmare.
Not quite happy, I contact support about it and, after some painful days of waiting, the solution to the problem was “switches were shipped lubed as stated in the box, here’s 5€ back so you can shut up”.
After that, ticket closed. No RMA process, no anything. Just 5€ to make me stop complaining.
Fourth and last problem occurs some days later: after discovering the crappy ass software included with the keyboard, which being the non-QMK version was kinda expected so I’m not mad, a not-so-fun fun fact about the keyboard popped out:
The rotary encoder does two clicks instead of one for every step. Two. Making that thing practically useless for fine adjustments. I tried remapping it to a shortcut like CTRL + and CTRL -, nothing. Two inputs for each step.
Of course I contact support about it aaaaand - radio silence. After the last “incident” I was somewhat blacklisted from their customer support and, still up to this day, haven’t gotten any response from them, leaving me with a keyboard I can barely use since I don’t have 4 hours of free time to lube up the switches that should’ve been factory lubed and with a practically useless rotary encoder since I use an external headphone amp.
I have no idea on where to find the ticket numbers etc since akkogear.de locale is 1/3rd in german, 1/3rd in english and 1/3rd in chinese and I can barely navigate myself to my order list.
TL;DR Akko Europe shipped me a keyboard kit that should’ve been factory lubed, made me shut up with a 5€ refund and ignored all my following inquiries about the rotary encoder not working properly, refusing any kind of return. Keyboard is still to this day unused in a drawer.
Thanks - it seems like only a certain kind of microcontrollers are supported. With QMK I suppose fixing the rotary encoder issue would be way easier, however I can’t find any information about the microcontroller of the 5075S as it only says “Akko” on top of it :/