Negative experience with NealsGadgets

I aslo placed my order yesterday, because I ordered my dreamed Nightwatch NS43 and also you can find it only on Neaslgadgets site. I knew about the possible problems, but I ordered it anyway. I hope all to be fine. If something go wrong we have Paypal protection.

It is with great reluctance that I post here but Neal really needs to sort out his communication and backup procedures.
Of the nine orders placed with him I have had problems with two of the lights. I contacted him on both occasions and received no reply.
As has been pointed out previously his prices are no better than average and although he stocks some interesting lights I will have to think hard before ordering anything else from him.
I have left neutral feedback on his site but there is little criticism there,it all seems to be glowing reports. Has anybody else left neutral/negative feedback there?

Good thread, I was gonna buy from him but will pass now.

I have had a few orders with Neal and have had no issues previously.

however i placed an order for two lights last Friday (12/6) and selected DHL shipping only to find that my order is still sitting as unfulfilled and has not been posted!

i hope everything is ok for Neal and there are no problems over there.
some level of communication would be great , i sent an email on Tuesday and got no reply Ive just sent another one and hopefully i get a reply.

if not im going to have no option put to talk to paypal and get a refund which i really donā€™t want to have to do.

not been so bad with me. replies to messages on his fb back to me ok .

Neal Zhang

Do you know how many days is needed Neal to proceed my order. Five days and my order still not shipped yet. Maybe this will be my first and last time when I order from him :person_facepalming: .

In my experience:

  • Pre-covid shipping from Neal to California via DHL took about 4 days. Very impressive. Thatā€™s faster than Illumn, which is only 10 miles away from me.
  • Post-covid shipping to California via DHL took a week and cost three times as much.
  • Post-covid the free shipping option only took a week and a half to arrive. Thatā€™s still at least a week faster than most other shipments from China.

My recommendation: skip DHL and go with free shipping. Itā€™s much cheaper and only a little slower.

If you absolutely MUST have a light delivered within 3 or 4 days I recommend avoiding the small shops. Due to limited personnel sometimes there is a delay in packing your order and shipping it. Youā€™d be better off buying something from Amazon.

I wish you luck icpart.

IF he had a business in USA I guarantee he would be OUT OF BUSINESS.

Not only is there a lot of competition, but companies thrive on customer service knowing that is the primary reason for getting return customers. Without it customers leave and the business fails. I could name at least One dozen American businesses that excel in customer service and their customers continue to come back.

The record for him speaks for itself when you read all the comments on this thread and others.Too many dissatisfied customers. I was one. One and done!

I understand what you are saying. But that has NOTHING to do with his lack of consideration/Customer service skills[none], responsibility and responsiveness which is feeble at best.

This is not about shipping. It is about his inability to communicate and respond as is his responsibility as a business owner.

Covid is not anymore excuse for delays. From Aliexpress I ordered some bike parts before two weeks, and they just arrived so quickly with Singapore post this week from China to Europe. Also processing time was just 2 days.
Also Nealsgadet doesnā€™t offer free shipping anymore. I made order over 50$ and was charged 6$ shipping cost. For odrers under 50$ is was 10$ shipping cost.

Regarding Free Shipping:
Maybe availability of free shipping depends on what country you are located in?

It says right on the website free shipping on orders over $50. I placed two orders 4 days ago each over $50 and got free shipping on both of them. I just double-checked the orders and confirmed that there was no charge for shipping. The shipping was indeed free.

My orders shipped fairly fast too. I ordered on Sunday and they shipped on Monday. Based on my previous experience with Neal, I hope my shipment arrives by the end of next week. Iā€™m quite pleased with Nealā€™s shipping so far since having something arrive in less than 2 weeks is way better than ordering from places like Aliexpress or Banggood where I typically expect shipping to take anywhere from 3 to 8 weeks.

Regarding Customer Service: Neal is a small online boutique discount shop with limited personnel. I typically donā€™t expect much in the way of customer service when I order things online. If I have a problem with something ordered from Banggood or Aliexpress itā€™s not even worth trying to get hold of a customer service rep, if they even have one available.

Even the biggest services like Amazon have their issues with customer service. Last year I had a huge amount of difficulty with Amazon. Numerous deliveries worth hundreds of dollars were marked as delivered but failed to ever arrive. I wasnā€™t the only one eitherā€¦ numerous other people at my building had the same issue. We even knew the cause of the problem: Amazon had switched delivery services to using their own in-house service. My office building had a bunch of small tenants (including me) on the bottom floor and Apple Computer on the top floor. Amazon assumed that any deliveries to the building were for Apple and instead of delivering them to the building sent them to Appleā€™s main mail center elsewhere in the city where they were never seen again. We tried calling. We filed online complaints. We told them the issue. They said they would look into it. But they never fixed the problem. Result: itā€™s no longer practical to order anything from Amazon for delivery to that office.

Maybe you right, free shipping is offering to USA only or for major big countries. But for me that is fake advertisement at all. There is no listing for which countries it is offering free shipment. But processing time for one week I think its not normal. Some years ago I have same bad expierence with Dealextreme and theirs very slow processing times. So after that I never order anything from them.

For what itā€™s worth a light I ordered with free shipping was delivered in 12 days from order date.

Finally yesterday I send email to Neal about my order. Surprisingly, he answered me quite quickly about that the Nightwatch NS43 is it out of stock and my oder will shipped next week. Nealā€™s website need improvements about status of listed items.

yes available stock would be good to see so u dont order something and then get out of stock mailā€¦

My experience with Neal has been positive.

When contacted about a problem concerning my FW21 Pro (my fault), Neal
Promptly responded and instructed me on how to resolve it.

When asked if he would sell me an extra tailcap with my next order, he said to
Remind him and he would drop one in.

To me that is great CS (Customer Service)!

Thanks, Neal!

For me it is not great at all. Ok I understand one of my item is out of stock and can wait for it, but I order also tiny Nitecore Tiki. If he want to have great CS why not send me my item which is in stock. Shipping cost will not be so high for that package.

NealsGadgets thin profit margin might disappear altogether if he mailed individual items
separately. :beer:

To minimize cost, I often opt to have bundled items mailed together. YMMV

So no info on website which items it is in stock, or when it will be restock. If you order different items and wait to restock all of them it is possible to wait one month for sending a package. I made order on 13 June and still waiting to be proceed my order. On Bangood it happened to me when I ordered something that it was not available after my order but they always sent me what was available with priority with different packages. I know that Nealā€™s buisness is not big like BG or GB but there need to be any time margin for sending packages.

My experience with Nealsgadgets has been much better than my ongoing experience with ff-light.com.

I ordered a E07 from Fireflies on May23rd and then ordered a FW21a Pro from NealsGadgets 2 days later. Fast forward and today, Iā€™ve had my FW21a Pro for 2 weeks now and still waiting for my E07ā€¦.

I messaged Neal via facebook messenger with a question and he replied to me within 24 hours. FireFlies took much longer AFTER I sent about 6 emails.

Iā€™ve also bought 2 Convoys via Banggood and they were decent but not quite as fast as Neal as far as shipping time to my door. Banggoodā€™s customer service is mostly a bot on messenger.

The one thing I learned that always works is to be persistent. It takes all of 30 secs to send an email/message