• October 18th, 2007
• Filed in
  • Web Design
  • Work

Back in April I wrote a post to encouraged visitors to take the Web Design Survey.

The results are in! And it’s looking fairly interesting. For the first time, I feel like I have some perspective.

Popularity: 13% [?]

• October 16th, 2007
• Filed in
  • Rants

There has been a folder on my desktop since early July called “Battery Debacle”. I’ve avoided writing this article for a while simply because I knew it’d be a novel - enjoy!

I’m very patient when I buy things online. I’ve had plenty of experience developing e-commerce sites. I’ve made some mistakes along the way so I have a bit of compassion for anyone that sells merchandise. My heart goes out specifically to customer service reps, but my experience with Silverstone Wireless was deplorable. After a year plus of use, the battery died in my hockey-puck-sized UTStarcom (Audiovox) PPC6700 cellphone. Note to self future Kyle: When one of the killer accessories for your phone is a Deluxe Gooseneck Automount, run away.

My adventure to find a new battery for my cellphone brought me to eBay and subsequently OEM vendor Silverstone wireless. Who was selling my battery for $4.99 - Buy it now!

S C O R E !!

Shipping was only $5 as well - I saw other vendors on legit e-commerce sites selling it for $30. I was in like Flynn.

To prevent mindless pissed off rambling, I’m going to blast through my experience using good ‘ol semantic markup.

1. 6/21 - Yeaa!! I won the Buy It Now auction for my new cellphone battery! I’m excited because currently I have about 5 minutes of talktime!
2. 7/1 - My item finally ships. I’m somewhat annoyed it’s taken this long to process because of my 5 min of talk-time performance, but at least it’s on its way!
3. 7/10 - Tracking page says my product was delivered, to Monroe, NY. I never received it. I start to get pissed. I call them daily trying to find a real person, dialing every extension available to me, with no success. I send 1/2 dozen emails, no replies. They picked the wrong person to take $10 from. I setup a Google alert to call daily @ 11am. I redial for 5 minutes straight, daily on and off for a month.
4. 7/31 - Plenty of frustration and $40 later, I finally purchase the battery for $30 from a reputable dealer. New Mission: Get my $10 back.
5. 8/13 - I finally caved in 1+ month later from the beginning of this debacle. I never received my product and did everything I could to get in touch with the company. I gave them about the worst feedback that eBay would allow with their character limit while being truthful and accurate. See feedback.
6. 8/14 - Whoa! It’s amazing how fast an eBay seller will jump to attention when they receive the dreaded negative feedback. I’m contacted by Joel of Silverstone who offers nothing but a complete cop out, blaming a bad-apple employee in his organization for the bad customer service. There shouldn’t be a single point of failure Joel, get your house in order.

I was rewarded my $10 refund eventually. The unnerving thing is that they wanted me to rescind my negative feedback after they REIMBURSED me. I promptly declined after receiving my reimbursement.

In business, mistakes happen all the time. However, customer service is also the single defining area where businesses can succeed and surpass all of their competitors. Silverstone wireless failed miserably at every customer service metric I can think of and got me riled up enough to put this post together with the hope it saves someone else $10 someday..

Am I being too harsh? My intentions writing this article is to warn any potential future Silverstone Wireless customers. Be cautious. My suggestion is to avoid this company at all costs. They’re craptastic.

UPDATE

These guys are complete do*chb*gs, I left my truthful negative feedback and they responded w/ their own telling me to “contact customer service if I had a problem.” I DID YOU A$$HOLES! Now I look like a POS eBay user because while 1 negative feedback. When your Silverstone Wireless and have 12039281301283 transactions with a ‘decent’ rating negative feedback doesn’t affect much, but when you have only had about 5 transactions on eBay and your rating goes down to 70% you look like an unreliable jerk. This is a serious flaw in eBay - does anyone know how to get vengeance on these guys? Aside from blogging of course

Popularity: 10% [?]