Shipping: The Tindie Guarantee

I purchased 3 “in stock” items from seller BBTech on the 7th of December and they still have not shipped. On the 11th I messaged the seller asking when my order will be shipping. The seller hasn’t responded. After checking to see what recourse I have it seems the seller has 30 days to ship the item. 30 days? Seriously? I will be requesting a refund via PayPal.

After digging a little deeper it seems that I’m not the only one that has had problems with this seller. I wish I had seen this before I made my order. I really like the idea of Tindie but without a buyer viewable rating system for sellers this will be the last purchase I will make from this site.

For anyone reading this post. I have purchased items from both Madworm and Femtocow and have been very impressed with their service. I highly recommend them. On the other hand, BBTech needs to be “voted off the island”.

Hi Dirtyengineer-

I’m sorry about this experience - definitely not the norm as you know from your other orders. I’m just going to answer all of your points in order so I make sure I don’t miss any-

• I just refunded your order in full. Super easy and we needed to know was you weren’t happy and we’ll do our part to right the ship

• 30 days is due to a variety of things (sellers going on vacation/ traveling/ parts on the way/ etc. However I’m interested to hear your thoughts. How long do you think would be appropriate? One thing to keep in mind, most sellers do this as a hobby to promoting their inventions. But honestly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what is acceptable from a customer’s stand point. The overwhelming majority ship within 48 hrs.

• We do have customer ratings that are per product. It sounds like you’d want to leave seller specific reviews as well? I just made the ticket, so the Engineering Team will discuss first thing tomorrow morning.

• On this seller, let me dig into their reviews further. It wouldn’t be right to make any judgements in the forums but I hear you loud and clear.

Again I apologize for this experience. If there is anything else, please let me know. My personal email is emile (at) tindie {dot} com

Emile

Founder of Tindie

Thank you for looking into this matter.

I fully understand that sellers go an vacation etc. Responsible ones will post that orders will be delayed as seen here. If a product is listed as “in stock” then there should be no reason it can not be shipped in 2-3 business days and if this isn’t possible a good seller would send a message explaining the delay. This is fully understandable, life happens and as you mentioned this is a hobby/part time endeavor for most sellers. Obviously custom orders and such would have much longer ship times.

As for rating system I was looking for a way of easily differentiating the good sellers from the not so good. Example, sellers that ship with 48 hours should be highlighted/recognized for this effort. Is there a reason why buyers are unable to see the sellers star ratings?

Good points on the 2-3 days. I’ll bring this up with other sellers.

On the ratings, it just needs to be exposed. We changed to the more detailed rating system a while back. Before we showed any results, we needed a good amount of data. You’re 100% right it’s time to surface that in a more clear & transparent way.

Thanks for the kick, we are on it!

For anyone that follows this thread, I just started a new thread to discuss # days to ship with sellers.

After cranking on this all day, here’s whats going out (hopefully) tomorrow…

Reviews on Sellers:

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As well as per product:

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You know when the order was placed and when it was marked as shipped. How about displaying median of how long it took to ship the item on the product page?