5/5

posted Oct-02-2008

This is a small outfit specializing in yo-yos, kites, and other skill toys. I ordered from them when I saw they had a hard-to-find yo-yo that I wanted for my collection in stock (along with a couple others I had been shopping for).

When they arrived, one of the Yo-Yo's had a manufacturing defect (it really surprised me, as the company that makes that yo-yo usually has really good quality control).

I contacted he proprietor (Mark), who was very helpful. I wanted to do a return for an exact replacement, but the store was out of the particular color I wanted. Mark then handled this as a return, and we also discussed some other yo-yos he had just gotten in stock that he was willing to give me the chance to order (even though the had not yet even been posted to his store's website yet).

He was a great communicator, sent out the new order very quickly (he personally took it to the post office to send it on a Saturday morning), and has been nothing but helpful and courteous.

Small proprietorships tend to be, for good or bad, dominated by their owner's (or senior employees') personality -- and in a niche product market like skill toys, that can really make the difference between a great and a bad experience.

In this case, not only were the store's prices good, but the way Mark was willing to handle the situation was exemplary. I won't hesitate to buy from his store again.

Overall, it's a great place to find good prices and somewhere that you know any questions you have can be answered by someone who is knowledgeable with those products... Good for both the yo-yo enthusiast and for someone who is a novice (or knows nothing about yo-yos but wants to get a gift for someone who is).

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5/5

posted Sep-27-2008

This company possibly has the best inventory tracking system of any exclusively "skill toys" vendor, and my experience with individuals answering emails has been uniformly positive. I'd strongly recommend them to anyone serious about you-yos or those who want to ask questions from a helpful staff before a purchase.

Good retailer to do business with in this niche market.

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5/5

posted Sep-22-2008

Good shop, decent prices, and were very helpful to me (Im someone who likes to collect older or unique yo-yos from my youth, but also sometime needs a hand when trying to figure out what's best for gifts, etc. out of newer product offerings.

Have placed a couple orders with them, and they're always responsive to questions and quick to follow through when an order is placed.

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5/5

posted Mar-11-2008

I ran across this websaite while looking for wheatgrass sprouting seeds (a vet had suggested that an indoor cat who has hairball problems might benefit from eating growing, sprouting wheatgrass, and as we'd tried a number of other ideas without success, I thought I'd try it.

Needless to say, the market for such a specialty product was not too deep. I would usually have attempted to use a merchant affiliated with a larger, known merchany (e.g. Amazon.com or Buy.com), but none provided specific enough product information for me to feel comfortable that I'd be getting exactly what I needed through them (even after emailing customer service at a few of them a couple of times).

I ran across Starwest Botanicals through a google search; I checked them here (they had no entry at the time) but their local BBB had no negative reports, so I decided to try them. I also a few other products (some loose-leaf tea for myself, some saffron for cooking, and sprouting barley grass -- another potentially cat-friendly seed product -- among them.)

Just a few days before, I had switched to a new version of NoScript I was using in my web browser (FireFox) and had not gotten all my settings correct up to my satisfaction yet, and ended up placing an order that was incomplete. I emailed them and submitted the balance of what I had intended to order as a separate order. By the next day, they had customer service had responded that they were able to combine the orders, and they adjusted the shipping costs down (without my even specifically having asked for that as I knew the mistake had originated on my end of the initial transaction).

I recevied the products, and everything was exactly as expected and well sealed for shipping (although the cat for whom the wheatgrass was bought smelled the decaf green tea the instant I opened the parcel, I couldn't detect any odor myself until I actually opeend the sealed container.) All of the product packaging was clearly marked as well (including country of origin of the contents).

Overall, it was a very positive experience, and since their customer service did me the good turn of combining me good orders, I thought I would do the favor by posting a review of them here. Hopefully the next person looking for specialty organic products who runs across them and chacks here will see that they treated me in an exemplary manner when I first ordered from them.

Because of the thin market for most of the products I bought, I honestly can't make a blanket statement as to their pricing (I'd think that for some of their products, not even larger organic/natural-focused chain retailers would have all the comparables... You'd probably need to include things like farmer's markets to really get a good idea... And that's not something easily done in Cleveland, OH towards the end of February). However, I have been buying and using saffron in cooking for many years, and their price for saffron was quite competitive -- but I don't feel comfortable extending my thoughts on that one product to their inventory as whole. (Especially as saffron is sold in such minute quantities as compared to most of the other items on offer.)

But aside from not being able to rate their pricing in any general way, the experience I had with them was excellent... And given the fact that I got exaclty the product I needed/ordered/expected vis-a-vis the sprotiung wheatgrass seeds, I would certinaly order from them again for anything that specific. (And I'd certinaly spend a few dollar more ordering from them and being 100% sure I was getting exactly what what I intended rather than risk a lower-priced provider from whom I had some questions about exactly what I'd get.)

This review was modified by geo442 on March 11 2008 01:41:11 PM

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1/5

posted Mar-04-2008

In the past, I ordered from this company and always found the experience to be at least adequate (god prices, responsive customer car, etc.)

However, on this last set of orders all the merchant's correspondence is coming from a new domain name (certifiedink.com), and email headers identify another entity (corp.valueclick.com) which I had never seen associated with the company before. The experience current experience was unpleasant and unsuccessful.

I placed a large order for various ink cartridges, and every item ordered was claimed to be in stock at teh time the order was placed.

The following day, an email was sent to me including the following text:

"Unfortunately, we are unable to fullfil your order (#2584614) at this time.
Due to heavy demand, some of the items on your order are currently not available. As soon as we receive your items (probably within the next 10 days), we will ship your order and you will receive email notification of the shipment."

The vagueness (both of about items and timing) were disconcerting. I immediately wnet to the website to check the status of the order. The entire order was blocked as "backordered", but there was no item-by-item breakdown of what was in or out of stock.

I then opened anoter browser session and checked each SKU that was in my "backordered" order. Each and every item was listed as "In stock" and available to be added to the cart in that other browser process.

After this, I used the form specifically provided on their website for order inquiries to ask specifically which items were in sotck and which were backordered, and if a partial shipment could be made or if the order could be broken into mltiple orders in the interest of getting osme concrete answer.

I received the following stock response, quoted in its entirety:

"On Mar 04 2008 3:02:57 pm, a member of our Customer Service Department wrote: Thank you for your inquiry, we apologize for any inconvenience. Please call us so we can handle this situation quickly and efficiently. Customer service can be reached toll free at 888-465-7765, Monday through Friday, 6am-6pm PST. Please let me know if you have any further questions. Thank you Customer Support Team"

Obviously the written inquiry I had placed using their form hadn't even been read, and the wording is vague enough that it would be difficult to establish that it was ever looked at by an employee rather than simply having a stock response bounce from a bot. Never had anythign like this happeend in my previous orders with te company.

I have (again using 123inkjet's web support system pput in a written request for my order to be cnacelled in its entirety and for written confirmation of this to be given. I am still awaiting response.

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1/5

posted Sep-24-2007

I purchased an (EagleBit-brandeD) external 2xHDD RAID enclosure from them, and that enclosure came with a CD-ROM claiming to have both the documentation and necessary drivers for certain RAID modes. The documentation was there, but the drivers were NOT on the disk. I also tried to find the correct firmware and software versions on the web (starting of course with the brand's website and then broadening the search when that turned out to be fruitless), but only found different versions of the software that went with diferent models of the enclosure (e.g. the FireWire equipped one USB or eSata ones), and none of those worked at all (or even recognized the hardware) for the USB model I had bought.

The same evening I figured all this out, I wrote Eaglebit regarding the problems (politely and in great detail, even referencing some of the specific file names that were missing but referenced in the pdf documentation on the included CD). I also pointed out that EagleBit's product page had flawed information regarding the software/drivers included with the kit (i.e. it claimed the necessary drivers were included), and suggested that they address the problems with the text on their product page or at least make sure the equipment starts shipping with the correct and necessary software to operate it as advertised.

I asked them to cover the S&H costs for my return due to the errors/inaccuracies on their website, but all I received in response was a was a boilerplate response:

[Quote]
"Please kindly go to www.eaglebit.com/rma to file for your return."
[/Quote]

(and that no special consideration regarding S&H would be given to me for this incident).

Incedentally, their "No Hassle Returns" policy requires you to pay for return shipping (which is common to e-tailers and doesn't bother me for reputable ones.) But Eaglebit's return policy has some proverbil "fine print" that if you retrn a product that was "free shipping" when you bought it -- and a large number of Eaglebit's products are free shipping -- that Eaglebit, at its sole discretion, will calculate/impute an outgoing shipping charge for the returned item and deduct that amount from your refund (and you won't know what dollar amount that is until the refund is processed). Now that I know about that last part -- especially that the "shippping cost" they deduct is up to them and not even reported to you until it's been completed -- I will never shop with them again. I still haven't gotten my refund, so I don't know how much they will deduct for the outbound shipping until the return credit hits the card I used for my purchase, so I can't opine if they will be "fair" or if they will inflate the shipping cost upon return... However, Simply having such a "black box" return policy and lableing it as "No Hassle" should be enough of a warning sign to make people very wary about purchasing from Eaglebit, especially any "free shipping" items that might need to be RMA'd for any reason.
______________________________

ADDENDUM:

IN RESPONSE to merchant's reply dated 9/24, this reply is exactly what I have come to expect from EagleBit. Addressing it point-by-point:

1) The EagleBit MOD-Series Dual bay/2-Bay SATA to USB 2.0 Enclosure has an enclosed CD-ROM, ostensibly with the software to allow it to run in RAID0 or in JBOD correctly under windows. In the PDF documentation (D:\MOD2-S350U-J\Manual.pdf) included p. 22 of the Appendix to that document (re: JBOD mode under newer versions of windows) is the quote:

[Quote]
Find the Win_Uploader_Install_2_16_0000.exe application in the CD and double click it, the “Oxsemi Uploader-InstallShield Wizard” should appear as shown above, click “Next”.
[/Quote]

The manual clearly references additional software necessary to make it run (at least in JBOD mode) under Windows XP, and that file was not on the disc (as the manual claimed) or available from EagleBit.

EagleBit's ResellerRatings resoponse states that "...USB external enclosure doesn't require driver on Windows 2000, and XP, Vista" and that "its plug and play." These are false assertions for this particular multi-bay enclosure per EagleBit's own documentation. I invite anyone from EagleBit to read their own manual as I have quoted it and try to maintain their current assertions.

2) The remark of "Don't know why customer have to force himself to install driver" should be answered very well by my point (1) -- i.e. the documentation explained that to run JBOS mode, the refernced Oxsemi applicaiton was *necessary*. There is no "force himself" about it.

3) I DID contact customer service and tech support (especially as it was an "EagleBit"-branded product.) Most of (1) is taken directly from those contact efforts. For my efforts, I received exactly one one-sentence response, whose FULL text is quoted above.

4) Notice that EagleBit makes no defense of their "No-Hassle" return policy. I sent the defective merchandis back a few days ago with an approved RMA number, but I STILL do not know how much of a refund I will get because of EagleBit's stated policy of "back-calculating" shipping costs on RMA'd "free" shipping items.

EagleBit's response here is factually incorrect, makes some veiled personal insults toward me "forcing [myself]", and clearly has no purpose other than to try to put the blame on the customer, facts of the matter notwithstanding.

Certianly, it is not the response of a retialer who wished to correct a problem situation or keep a customer's goodwill. I again urge potential customers to read EagleBit's response to my posting here and decide if it is the kind of reply they want to see themselves if a transaction does not go perfectly or an RMA on an order becomes necessary.

This review was modified by geo442 on September 28 2007 08:24:09 PM

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5/5

posted Sep-23-2006

Once again, the people at NewEgg are teh reason why I frequent this store so often. I had a problem with a motherboard I ordered just outside of 30 days ago, and after extensive contacxt with tech support with the manufacturer (DFI), they sent me a generiuc email saying all their RMA's in the US are done via their resellers.

When I called NewEgg, a very pleasant rep (named Claudia) said that they ususally needed a reference number to do this sort of exchange, and of course in my emails with DFI's people I had gotten boilerplate language and no such reference code (at least from those contacted after it was established that this was an RMA). I explained this to her, adn she put me on hold while checking with her manager, who waived that reference requirement and got the RMA completed right away.

Of all the larger computer/consumer electronics e-tailers, I would, from my own personal experiences, say that NewEgg's post-purchase customer serrvice is as effective and efficient as they come -- and this with great consistency.

As someone who often looks for the lowest-cost items on price comparison websites, I am definitely willing to pay a premium to buy from Newegg, both because of their efficiency in getting orders processed and the aforementioned support. (Of course, the other beautiful thing is that Newegg quite often turns out to be one of the lowest-cost providers on many of those searches I do, which is another great reason to do business with them.)

This review was modified by geo442 on July 30 2007 10:30:03 AM

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