A good dealer is one of the most valuable people in the equipment trade, and the way to keep one good is to know exactly what they are — before the contract, not after the first breakdown. Working with a foot assessment equipment dealer can buy you local language, local presence and local speed. It can also buy you a middle layer between you and the engineering answers your room will eventually need. The difference between the two outcomes is not luck. It is a set of questions, asked early, that this article lays out in the order they should be asked.
We manufacture plantar pressure measurement systems and custom orthotic insoles, and we work with dealers in several markets — which means this article is written from the factory side of the triangle, with no interest in talking dealers down and every interest in defining the roles precisely. A triangle with blurry edges is where service relationships go to die; a triangle with clear edges is how a factory, a dealer and a clinic each deliver what only they can.
Read it if you buy through dealers, if you are one, or if you are deciding between the two routes. The questions are the same in all three cases; only the chair you sit in changes.
What a dealer actually adds — and what they cannot
The honest case for a dealer rests on four services. Local language: contracts, training and support delivered in the words your staff actually think in. Local presence: someone who can be in the room, which matters more in equipment than in almost any other trade. Local stock: consumables and common spares that do not need to cross an ocean. And local knowledge: the regulations, the buying culture, the service expectations of your specific market. None of these is marginal; together they are often the difference between an installed machine and a working service.
What a dealer structurally cannot be is the engineering authority. The firmware, the sensor layer, the production routine, the spare-parts inventory — these live at the factory, and no amount of local excellence manufactures them. When a dealer claims full engineering ownership of a product they did not build, the claim should be read as enthusiasm rather than as a fact, and the triangle should be defined so that nobody needs the claim to be true.
The best dealer relationships state this openly. Ours do: the dealer handles the relationship layers, the factory handles the engineering layers, and the customer knows which door to knock on for which question. The alternative — pretending one party can do everything — works until the first genuinely technical problem, at which point the pretence costs weeks and the customer’s trust.
So the first question for any dealer conversation is also the simplest: what is your division of labour with the factory, in writing? The answers to everything else in this article arrange themselves around it.
The five questions that define the relationship
First: who holds the warranty, and who performs it? Equipment carries a twelve-month warranty in our case — non-human damage, free replacement parts — and the triangle should state who receives a claim, who diagnoses, who ships parts and who signs off the repair. Each hop adds days; a triangle that has never rehearsed the claim path will discover its latency on the worst possible day.
Second: where do spare parts live? The factory shelf and the dealer’s local stock are different assets with different lead times. Ask what the dealer keeps locally — surfaces, cables, common consumables — and what comes from the factory, and how the two inventories talk to each other. A room down for three weeks while a board crosses an ocean is a planning failure that was visible at contract time.
Third: who trains, and who retrains? Installation training is the visible half; retraining for new staff is the half that determines year three. Ask whether the dealer provides both, whether the factory supports remote sessions for new operators, and what materials exist so the knowledge does not live in one employee’s resignation letter.
Fourth: who owns the software relationship? Updates, configuration changes, report templates — the software is the product’s living half. Ours updates over the air for connected units, and the triangle should say who requests changes, who receives them and who trains the room when the interface moves.
Fifth: what happens when the dealer relationship ends? Territories, exclusivity and handover terms are standard commercial questions, but the operational ones are rarer and heavier: who keeps the service history, who holds the client records, who answers the machines already installed. A triangle that cannot answer this question is not finished being designed.
The division-of-labour question also has a customer-side answer worth writing down: what will you, the buyer, handle in-house? Rooms that expect the triangle to carry everything — training refreshers, consumables, minor configuration, first triage of every anomaly — are the rooms where triangles strain first. The service works best when each party carries what it is closest to: the room its daily operation, the dealer its market, the factory its engineering. A written one-page statement of those responsibilities, agreed at contract time, prevents most of the emails that otherwise follow the first month.
How to evaluate a dealer before signing
The evaluation differs from a factory evaluation in one useful way: you are assessing an organisation’s discipline rather than a production line. Start with the same documentary instinct, though. How long has the dealer represented this factory, and can the relationship be confirmed from the factory side? Our partner programme publishes who carries our products, and we confirm dealer relationships on request — a two-minute check that prevents an entire category of misunderstanding.
Then ask for evidence of the four services claimed earlier, in your market. Language: sample training material in your language, written by the dealer rather than machine-translated at installation. Presence: which installations can you speak to, and will the dealer arrange the calls? Stock: what is physically on their shelf today? Knowledge: what market-specific questions have they already solved for someone like you? Each claim has a cheap verification; dealers who welcome the verification are telling you how they run everything else.
Ask the dealer to describe the factory’s product in one breath of physics. A dealer who can — who knows that a pressure system senses load and records posture, and who says so without reaching for borrowed vocabulary — has been trained by the factory and pays attention. A dealer who cannot will be translating your technical questions into their own guesses, and you will be living inside the translation error.
Finally, check the escalation path by asking for its last use. When did the dealer last need the factory for a technical problem, what happened, and how long did it take? Every real relationship has a story; the story’s shape tells you more than any service-level promise, and a dealer who answers the question comfortably is one who has survived contact with reality and organised accordingly.
Exclusivity deserves its own paragraph because it distorts triangles quietly. A dealer with exclusive territory earns protection and owes performance; a dealer without it competes on service. Buyers should know which regime they are buying into, because it changes who answers them: an exclusive dealer is a partner with obligations, a non-exclusive dealer is one option among many. Neither is wrong. Unstated is wrong — and the buyer who asks the question early gets a straighter answer than the buyer who discovers it during a dispute.
The factory side: what we owe the triangle
A triangle only works when the factory behaves like one too, so here is our side of the ledger in the same terms. We confirm dealer relationships in writing, and we answer technical questions that arrive from a dealer’s customer through the dealer — because undermining the local channel is how factories lose markets. We hold the engineering authority openly: the seven-day test before every dispatch, the twelve-month warranty with free replacement parts, the parts inventory, the over-the-air update pipeline and the remote-assistance sessions all run from the building where the machines are made.
We also owe the dealer training, and we owe it in a form that survives staff turnover — documented, repeatable, refreshed. A dealer whose knowledge lives in one veteran is a single resignation away from becoming a reseller. The factory that trains the dealer’s next generation is protecting its own market as much as the dealer’s business.
And we owe honest boundaries about what the local channel can promise. Our terms — machine orders from one unit, ODM accepted on equipment, insole minimums and sampling times, delivery cadences by lane — are published in writing precisely so no dealer has to improvise them and no customer has to guess them. A triangle with published terms is one where every party can check every claim in seconds; the alternative is a chain of telephone interpretations.
Buyers can hold any factory to this standard: ask what the factory owes the dealer, in writing. The answer’s existence — not its content — is the signal. Factories that have thought about the triangle can describe it; factories that have not will describe a product.
A final evaluation habit: read the dealer’s questions, not only their answers. The dealer who asks about your volumes, your staff, your room and your service plans is building the relationship on information; the dealer who only presents is building it on hope. In three conversations you will hear the difference, and it predicts the service years better than any testimonial — because support, at its heart, is the habit of asking before being asked.
Choosing between the routes: dealer or direct
The honest comparison is not about price — it is about which service layers you want to own. Buying direct from a factory gets you the engineering voice in every conversation, published terms, and full responsibility for local presence, import and first-line service. Buying through a dealer outsources those local layers at the cost of a margin and a hop in the technical path. Most markets support both routes, and mature buyers often use both — direct for the fleet and the factory relationship, a dealer for the front line of a different territory or segment.
The deciding questions are operational. Do you have staff who can absorb installation and first-line support? Is your market one where local presence changes outcomes — language, regulations, service speed? Will your volume support a dealer’s attention, or would you be their smallest account? A dealer’s margin buys real services; the mistake is paying for services you already own, or declining to pay for services you need.
Whichever route you choose, keep the engineering path short. The questions in this article exist so that, on the morning a machine misbehaves and a client is in the room, the distance between your question and the person who can answer it is one hop — not three, and not a guess about whose telephone rings first.
Service years: the part the contract forgets
Contracts cover the purchase; the service years run on habits. The triangle’s habits are worth designing at signing: which channel carries which questions, who reviews the installation after the first month, how retraining happens when staff change, when the parties talk about the next unit. None of this is contractual weight; all of it is the difference between equipment that gets used and equipment that gets tolerated.
Our support structure is built to make those habits cheap: a dedicated WhatsApp group per customer with direct engineer access, remote assistance where the site permits, over-the-air updates for connected units, and a published terms page — the FAQ — that any party in the triangle can check without asking anyone. Buyers and dealers are welcome to hold every factory they work with to the same standard, including this one.
Frequently asked questions
Do you sell direct as well as through dealers?
Yes. Direct enquiries run through our contact pages with published terms, and dealer enquiries through our partner programme. The engineering support, warranty and update pipeline are the same in both routes — what differs is who carries the local service layers.
How do we confirm a dealer really represents you?
Ask us. We confirm dealer relationships in writing on request, and our partner programme publishes who carries our products. It is a two-minute check that prevents an entire category of misunderstanding.
Who handles a warranty claim in the dealer triangle?
Whatever the written division of labour says — and it should say, before signing. The warranty itself is ours: twelve months on non-human damage with free replacement parts. The claim path, diagnosis and part shipping should be defined among factory, dealer and buyer so nobody discovers the latency during an outage.
What should a dealer keep in local stock?
The items your room cannot wait an ocean for: surfaces and consumables, cables, the small parts with high failure frequency. What belongs on the factory shelf versus the local shelf is a question worth answering per market at contract time, in writing.
Can the factory support training directly?
Yes. Remote sessions for new operators are part of our support structure, and dealers typically run the local, in-person layer. The two coexist; the division should be stated in the triangle like everything else.
Do software updates reach machines bought through dealers?
Yes. Connected units receive over-the-air updates regardless of purchase route, and the software relationship’s request path — dealer or direct — should be defined so changes are not lost in translation.
What are your published commercial terms?
Machine orders start at one unit; ODM is accepted on equipment with OEM negotiable separately; insoles start at two hundred pairs mixed, with samples in three days; delivery runs six to seven working days by express, ten to twelve by air, thirty to thirty-five by sea. All of it is stated on the FAQ page in writing.
What we would do next
If the direct route is your interest, start at the product range and the partner programme page; if you want the machines behind the dealer conversation, the X3 platform and F2 system pages describe the range in manual language. For the supplier-side version of this article, vetting a gait analysis system supplier runs the same questions from the other chair.
This article is intended for professional and educational reference. It is not medical advice. Foot assessment equipment produces measurements and images; clinical interpretation and any decision about care remain the responsibility of a qualified professional. Certification scope is limited to the documentation we hold: European Union certification and ISO quality system certification.