Thank you Kyle for reaching out to the community and welcoming feedback to try and improve. This is a very respectful thing of you to do and is simply good business IMHO.
I used to buy frequently from FT since 2015 but have had multiple issues with at least 5 orders this year in 2021. In fact one order is still hung up in the postal system here in the USA. It has never been delivered. With that said, you used to have a policy that if the goods were not delivered in a certain length of time, such as 120 days, that you would refund or reship to the customer.
Apparently that is not longer true as i have spent much time, stress, and debate with worthless FT support over trying to get your support people to either reship or refund the one item that has not been delivered that i have given up on this and accept the loss of the $26.30 ---->
Order Number:
B042883918
Order Placed:
4/28/2021
Order Total:
$26.30
Tracking Number: LY765600970CN
Granted this is a small amount but I do not like to just throw away $26.30 every time I order online. And I have had other international orders that have not been delivered for whatever the reason, and have received a refund from the associated vendors on AliExpress, plus one from Banggood.
As a result of the troubles with 5 orders this year with FT I have not made any further FT orders. I have taken my business to other international vendors - primarily AliExpress, but also DHGate, Banggood, and Kaidomain. Over the past 6 months it is estimated that I've spent well over $4000 with these other businesses..... that's a lot of flashlights and other misc items.
Having said all that, if you could correct the FT issue of not reshipping and/or refunding for non-delivery of goods you would have a chance at receiving some of my future business. Until then I wish you good luck and success in your time back with FT.
I used to order from FastTech over 5 years ago and recently placed a couple orders. My main suggestions for improvement are to once again carry name brand batteries (Panasonic/Sanyo, Samsung, LG) in 18650 and 21700 and to have a larger selection of Convoys.
Simon’s Aliexpress store has far more selection than FastTech does and i prefer to order from FastTech.
I still use my FastTech 18650 Sanyo batteries from 2012ish and would be interested in upgrading to 21700s.
I’m trying to give FT another shot at my business but have questions on shipping options and payment.
You said e-packet was the way to go for quickest shipping times but e-packet says 12-30 days and free registered airmail is just 10-14 days. Do you still recommend e-packet for delivery to the US?
Also I see PayPal is no longer an option. Is this true? If so it will greatly impact your sales prospects, including mine.
This is terrible. I am truly sorry about this. This is all hindsight now but if you don’t mind, I’m going to look into that order to see what happened — I’m going to let you know privately through an email about what I find out. Though no matter what it was, I’m going to make sure something like this is not going to happen again on Jasmine’s and my watch.
I miss the old times, especially with the fun with the Asgard flashlight!
Kyle
Johnny, please select the “USA ePacket Routed by FastTech” option during checkout. We switched this option to a carrier which has been delivering under 2 weeks lately. Though with Christmas coming, it may get a bit slower again — we will monitor and update here if the delivery time changes. Please note that this option isn’t available for batteries and products with batteries inside.
PayPal is available as before, except for e-cigarette products. When those are added to the cart, only direct credit card payment remains available. In all cases, it is possible to buy a gift card with PayPal, which comes with a 3% free value, and is stackable with the BLF coupon, giving a maximum of ~11% discount.
It’s a bummer but we do still want to be part of this community. We practically started here and we would like to be part of BLF for good, regardless of how many flashlights are ordered :).
We hear you. This will be worked on right now. By the way, a couple dozens of brand name (Samsung, Sanyo, etc) cells were already re-listed last week — please have a look and let me know if these are part of what you’re looking for. Thanks!
Max, I am very sorry for the experience. We dropped the ball by not processing the return-to-sender package represented by the tracking in your message — this is being fixed now and will be prevented. We are sending you an email as I write this to offer reship or issue a refund right away. I will look at the other orders and get in though with you privately as well.
What is with the trend of deleting order history after a certain period?? Bangood does this. Ebay does this. I occasionally go back and reorder items but I am unable to find the exact item because order history has been deleted. Why do this? It’s super inconvenient.
I’ve generally had great success with FT, notably:
— actual photo of the package to be mailed, and legit tracking number, unlike some unnamed places that give you a bogus number that never goes anywhere and is in fact untrackable.
— a domestic address (Florida) where returns can be sent and even getting reimbursed no-questions-asked for postage!!, vs the runaround other places give, trying to ship a package back to China prepaid for 3× as much as the purchase cost of the item!
My only “complaints” are really minor nitpicks. Eg, I tried to order a light (OnTheRoad, I think), and it was listed in-stock, but was to take X days to ship, then got put off, and put off, etc., and I canceled that order and decided to wait until it’d be actually in stock, but was told that it wouldn’t be in-stock until someone (ie, me ) would actually order it. Confusing, and a bit frustrating.
Hmm, that’s it, I think. My only “complaint”.
But all in all, especially the 2 items listed above, make me pretty confident to keep ordering from FT.
This was indeed the number one issue we dealt with, when I started here again last month. While we still reply on supplier inventory for much of our offerings and as such “ships in # days” products are still abundant, we are confident that we are delivering on this promised shipping time now.
In fact, so much so that we are now actively contacting customers and handing out gift cards for products which, though rare now, suffered from shipping delays.
Thanks for this.
I am interested in these Samsung 21700s but when i search google for them they all have a light blue wrapper while these have a white wrapper so i don’t know if they are authentic or counterfeit.
All brand name products are guaranteed authentic. There are two variants of these cells: white-ish gray, and blue — both guaranteed to be genuine. We are sending cells with blue wrap version.
Product photos will be updated to match that of the currently shipping batch ASAP.
Edit: FastTech currently ships the following cell:
FT is telling through email and PM here at BLF, that they are re-shipping my order. That is progress and good news. I will post here when i receive the reshipped item. Thank you FT for taking care of business.
Can you get SK68 clones with a solid shelf, rather than just a ledge, on which to mount the emitter?
I like to mod those as giveaways so don’t care how bad the cheap-clone LED is.
I’d kind of given up on FT after trying to get an answer, and I presumed FT was just taking orders and getting products dropshipped without ever having them in your hands to look at.
We have used the same supplier for almost 10 years and they have a trustworthy track record (we are not their only retailer customer). Their explanation to me is that there are two wrap colors: white-ish gray (older batches) and blue (modern batches). FastTech’s product photos weren’t updated for years :/, and so they showed the white ones. The photos are now up-to-date.
Please let me know if this makes sense, and I will follow up on this.
I have asked the team to look into this and will report back.
The service staffs can be overly blithe sometimes — we are working on this and I apologize for this. For a lot of products we do rely on vendor inventory but we don’t drop ship anything except for US warehouse products. All flashlight products do get through our hands.
Now i am more confused, if the white were legitimate then they should be known elsewhere. Also they said 3 under Samsung which suggests 3rd generation but your current photo is 1st generation (not the 2nd generation you see elsewhere).
This supplier is not sounding authentic.
I’d like to address the two concerns that seem to be present. First of all, the 3rd gen cells with white wrap (with a 3 under the word Samsung) is guaranteed to be legit. These are OEM products so the only possible proof is probably through testing. I understand that there isn’t information available on the 3rd gen cells but, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, they are genuine.
Then there is an issue of our supplier filling our orders of cells with different gens every week. The team was asked to keep photos updated so there has been two photo updates since this thread started.
To summarize, here are the three generations FastTech is shipping — they are all guaranteed to be genuine Samsung cells:
Blue INR21700-50E (1st gen) - no numeric number directly under the letter S in Samsung
Blue INR21700-50E (2nd gen) - numeric number 2 printed directly under the letter S in Samsung
White INR21700-50E (3rd gen) - numeric number 3 printed directly under the letter S in Samsung
We are also able to specifically ship 1st and 2nd products for customers’ orders, by request.
) would actually order it. Confusing, and a bit frustrating.