_Rant_On
Maybe I’m the only one with a negative experience. I ordered a couple batteries. A couple days later I checked the order status, and it said “completed” so I figured they probably shipped it already. Then last night instead of a shipping notification, I get a pay pal invoice for 84 cents, which I paid. The invoice said “for goods and services”. I mentioned in the notes that I paid it, but politely asked for an explanation of the charge—no reply to that.
Today after I had been at my desk a few hours it dawned on me that I wasn’t getting very good service and I sent an email to Richard saying that I didn’t really like getting a vaguely worded invoice this far into the order process when I thought I had completed my order (which did say ‘completed’ for the status) and that I would be writing a negative review.
Now to be fair, he was very communicative. But very adamant that his home page did specify that WA and UT customers would get a separate invoice. But in 20 something years of ordering from the Internet, I’ve never seen a store do this, so it wasn’t something I expected. I’m not really a fine print reader and I take some responsibility for that, but I’m supposed to read the fine print of every web site to see if the order I placed was really placed and not waiting on a second transaction in order to ship? I reject that sentiment. I’ve never read the fine print of goinggear or amazon to see if completing an order actually means completing an order. I put in my card info, press ‘pay now’ and stuff arrives at my doorstep.
Again, in the sake of fairness, he did apologize for the slow shipping, and I understand my email had an irate tone, but he kind of treated me like I was stupid for not reading the fine print on his web site. And instead of being apologetic about the rickety e-commerce site (I build these type of sites for a living) he was running, he informed me that his volume in WA was too low to justify the expense of making his system work correctly. Ok, got it, you only want happy, high volume customers. And apparently “we ship FAST” only counts if you don’t owe an extra 84 cents on your order, regardless of what the order status says.
Yes, I am a grumpy old man, just one kid shy of yelling “get off my lawn you kids”, but I’m also a loyal customer to dozens of stores that give me great service, and I do my best to reward the truly great sellers like Illumination Supply and hkequipment by showering them with praise and telling everyone I know how awesome they are, and in all honesty, I didn’t see a high degree of awesomeness from Mountain Electronics for my first order. It’s a good thing I always put in a small “test order” the first time I use a seller
He did give me a full refund for both invoices, but I’m going to go against the grain here and say avoid Mountain Electronics.
_Rant_Off