Complaint e-mail about a damaged lamp: register, structure, deadline
On 3 May you order a desk lamp (Modell „Lumo 2“, 89,90 €, Bestellnummer 4471-882) from an online shop. It arrives on 9 May; when you unpack it, the ceramic base is cracked and the lamp tilts. The shop's website says: „Reklamationen innerhalb von 14 Tagen nach Erhalt.“ You need the lamp for a desk you are setting up this week, so a quick replacement matters more to you than a refund, though you would accept the money back. You open a scratch file and write two possible versions: one starts „Hallo, meine Lampe ist kaputt!!!“ and ends „Liebe Grüße“; the other starts „Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,“ and ends „Mit freundlichen Grüßen“. You also have three rough notes: „Lampe kaputt“, „Ich will mein Geld zurück“, „Antworten Sie schnell“.
1. Which opening and closing pair do you send, and why does the other one fail here?
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Send the formal pair: „Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,“ … „Mit freundlichen Grüßen“. This is a business transaction with a company about a faulty product - the register is set by the relationship, not by how annoyed you are.
Why the informal pair fails: „Hallo“ plus „Liebe Grüße“ signals a private message, and combined with „!!!“ and „kaputt“ it reads as a complaint to a friend. The recipient may still help, but you have given them no clear business frame in which to open a case. Format details matter too: a comma after the salutation and a lower-case start on the next line („… Damen und Herren,“ / „am 9. Mai …“), and a name on the line after „Mit freundlichen Grüßen“, with no comma and no full stop after the formula.
2. Turn the three rough notes into sentences that fit the letter, and explain what changes each time.
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- „Lampe kaputt“ → „Die Lampe ist beschädigt bei mir angekommen.“ Not „kaputt“ (colloquial) but „beschädigt“; „angekommen“ is the perfect participle of an intransitive verb, combined with „sein“; „beschädigt“ describes the condition on arrival. Add the concrete detail - „der Sockel ist gebrochen“ - because a description the reader can picture is harder to dispute.
- „Ich will mein Geld zurück“ → „Ich bitte um Erstattung des Kaufpreises“ or, since you want the lamp, „Ich bitte um schnellstmöglichen Ersatz.“ „Ich will“ sounds like a demand from someone with no case; „ich bitte um“ is firm and formal at once, and the nominal style („Erstattung des Kaufpreises“) is standard in German business writing.
- „Antworten Sie schnell“ → „Ich bitte um eine Rückmeldung bis zum 23. Mai.“ An instruction to the reader becomes a request with a date. A deadline gives the letter its force; „schnell“ gives it nothing to measure.
3. Which facts must appear in the first two sentences, and where do the request and the deadline belong?
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First two sentences: Bestellnummer 4471-882, the product, the order date and the delivery date - e.g. „Am 3. Mai habe ich in Ihrem Shop die Lampe ‚Lumo 2‘ (Bestellnummer 4471-882) bestellt. Die Lieferung kam am 9. Mai an.“ The number is indispensable: a shop handles hundreds of orders and cannot act on „meine Lampe“ without it; the delivery date is the starting point for the shop's stated 14-day window; compare it with the actual complaint date, which the scenario does not specify. This shop notice does not establish all statutory consumer rights.
Then: description of the fault, then the request near the end (replacement first, refund as the alternative), then the deadline („bis zum 23. Mai“), then the closing formula. Stating the remedy early and the date late keeps the letter readable; putting the deadline in sentence one makes it sound like a threat rather than a reclamation.