Adorama... sadly, don't think I'll be buying from them in the future

Overread · Jul 22, 2016

As said contact Helen about problems - far as I know she's still their main internet rep and generally gets things sorted out without problems.

kalgra · Jul 22, 2016

For what it's worth I had a similar experience with B&H as well. I think it's just a sign of the sad customer support most companies believe is acceptable these days.

I ordered a 15mm 1:1 macro shift lens and when I received it I found that while it appeared fine and worked fine there was something either misaligned or machined wrong on the bayonet and it was so incredibly difficult to mount to my 6D that I was scared I was going to damage my camera. I sent it back for a replacement which was very easy and at this point I can't complain about B&H but this is the point things started going down hill. About 10 days later I received my replacement but to my dismay as I took it out of the shipping box I immediately noticed that the manufacturer box looked like it was kicked down 12 flights of stairs then drug behind a bus on a gravel road for a few miles. I opened the box and the lens is just crammed into the box with none of the original packing materials the first one had, it was just jostling around inside along with the other pieces, the lens cap wasn't even the same size or brand, and the lens hood was missing!!!!! WTH!!

Here's where it gets even better. I examine the lens further and it has oil all over the front element and down the side of the bayonet. Ugh again WTH!! It had bad wear marks all around the bayonet where you could see that the lens had clearly been used for quite some time. I did clean up the lens and I will say that this one mounted fine and functioned fine, but I didn't purchase someone's old beat up piece of poop I paid for a new one.

I emailed B&H customer support with some very choice words and demanded they send me a new one ASAP and after some time with no reply started making phone calls. I did get to a person fairly easily who was just a nice kid who was sympathetic to the whole thing but apperantly had no authority to do anything about it but to recommend I either send it back for another replacement or refund. I asked if at least they would send me the new one first so I could use the one I had since this was clearly their failure. I mean who on earth could have looked at the state of that box and think "hmmm yes this one is ok to send to a customer that already had one defective copy". I was transferred to the guys manager who was a grumpy ass hat who insisted this was not there fault and it must have come from the manufacture that way. So what I said "if Apple sent Verizon a piece of poop in in a beat up box does that mean it's ok for them to turn around and sell it to you as a shiny new iPhone?" No reply to that suffice to say nothing was done to correct the issue other than I had to ship back the second copy and wait another 10 days for a third replacement which thank god was a good was a good one.

About a week later or so I get an email asking me to complete a survey about my experience and you better believe I went off on that thing. You think I got a call back or so much as a return email? Well no not really until fast forward I'd say at least 4 months later when out of the blue I get an apology letter from them with a $15 gift card for my next purchase. Which hey I guess is better than nothing but hardly acceptable customer service.

End rant!

robbins.photo · Jul 22, 2016

tecboy said:
I think what had happened is Adorama is probably understaff. They have to communicate over a million of people throughout the country and perhaps around the would. That is why they give cut & paste apology letter to save times.

The first time they sent me the cut and paste email, sure, I'd accept that. When I wrote back to complain and they sent me the exact same cut and paste email in response, even though the original cut and paste email was included as part of my reply? Eh.. nope, sorry. That's just a completely unacceptable level of customer service to me.

robbins.photo · Jul 22, 2016

vintagesnaps said:
I've cancelled a back order with Adorama a couple of times, but just a small item I ordered along with the main item I was buying. Do you have an online account there? Seems like all I did was sign in, and - cancel the backorder. I don't remember exactly but seems like it was as simple as that.

Best thing I did was get a regular customer service rep there. Just whoever I'd happened to talk to and was happy with, then called the same rep next time. Now if I order online I can put in the rep's name where it asks 'who helped you with your order'. Even if I ordered it myself online instead of calling (and didn't necessarily get help from anyone) I put in the rep's name, then he gets the order, and sometimes is able to make a little price adjustment (not always, it depends).

After a couple or so emails, next time I'd call so you don't go thru a convoluted mess like this again.

I do have an online account, though I won't be using it anymore. In the grand scheme of things it's not like I ordered a ton of stuff from them so they probably won't miss me much as a customer.

Just sad that it's getting so hard in this day and age to get good customer service.

robbins.photo · Jul 22, 2016

kalgra said:
For what it's worth I had a similar experience with B&H as well. I think it's just a sign of the sad customer support most companies believe is acceptable these days.

End rant!

Yikes. I haven't done a lot of business with B&H, I've ordered a couple of things from them but they are usually not at the top of my list simply because at least in my experience their shipping seems to take longer than a lot of the other sources I have available. I can pay extra to get it faster but a lot of what I buy online is just little stuff I have a hard time finding locally, so paying $10 to ship a $10 item just never seems like that good a deal to me.. lol.

SquarePeg · Jul 22, 2016

What were you emailing them about? Were you unable to cancel your order online?

robbins.photo · Jul 22, 2016

SquarePeg said:
What were you emailing them about? Were you unable to cancel your order online?

I was able to cancel the order. It had been close to a week and I was trying to get some kind of an ETA so I might have a better idea as to whether or not I should just keep waiting or give up and order it someplace else.

Initially it wasn't really a huge deal, I mean it was just an extension for an optech camera strap. Wasn't the end of the world by any means. But when I sent the first email and waited most of the day for a response, I finally just said the heck with it and decided to cancel. When I canceled I noted that they item was still marked as available on their website even though I'd been waiting for close to a week while it was on backorder. I pointed this out, I got the cut and paste canned response that really didn't address that at all.

I was pretty irked that they didn't really read my email before they responded, so I responded back and complained and asked for them to refer it to a supervisor or manager, I got the exact same cut and paste response I received the first time to my second email.

5 emails later and I have yet to have anyone at Adorama actually respond with anything other than a template that they cut and paste, none of which ever addressed any of my concerns. Became pretty clear that they weren't even reading the emails, just skimming them and if they see the word "backorder", that's the canned response you get, etc.

So yup, they lost my business. Funny too, I wasn't really all that upset about the backorder thing, wasn't really a big deal. They lost my business because I won't do business with a company that doesn't respect me enough to take a few minutes to actually read and respond to my emails.

Overread · Jul 22, 2016

Robbins you sure you're not just emailing an auto-reply system? Or that Adorama hasn't got something wrong at their end and is just sending out the same auto-reply via machine ?

robbins.photo · Jul 22, 2016

Overread said:
Robbins you sure you're not just emailing an auto-reply system? Or that Adorama hasn't got something wrong at their end and is just sending out the same auto-reply via machine ?

Well I took the email from their website, so as far as I know it should be a valid email monitored by humans.

Also, the time they take to respond is usually several hours to as much as a day, so it doesn't seem like it's an autoresponder of some sort.

Overread · Jul 22, 2016

Strange, the best I can guess is potential farming out of support to a system that uses people who basically search for buzzwords and deliver an automatic reply. Which kind of works for typical stuff but if anything doesn't exactly fit the pre-written help sheet they have it fails. This tends to fail if support are really badly paid or trained and thus have no actual choices; if support is a fly-by visit by someone doing something else; if its farmed out to people who can't really read English all that well (thus they really are just looking for buzzwords and firing off the likely pre-written answer).

I would urge you to contact Helen - as said earlier - at the very least you might get to the bottom of what is going on.

robbins.photo · Jul 22, 2016

Overread said:
I would urge you to contact Helen - as said earlier - at the very least you might get to the bottom of what is going on.

I guess I could ask out of curiosity, but to be honest I doubt there is a whole lot she could do or say about the situation that would change my decision to take my business elsewhere.

They just have too many competitors selling stuff at pretty much the same prices who are willing to pay attention to details like customer service. Same reason I haven't bought a computer from HP in ages. We had one years ago, they outsourced their customer support to India, and after that experience I swore I'd never buy another HP again. Never have. From what I understand they did eventually realize what a disaster outsourcing was and they moved it back to the states, but by that time I'd moved on.

gckless · Jul 22, 2016

One reason why I prefer to call people. You might wait on the phone for a few minutes, but you wait longer for a response via email, and while they might have a cue card they're reading from initially, you're still talking to a person.

BananaRepublic · Jul 22, 2016

robbins.photo said:
So last week I ordered a couple of extension straps from Adorama from their website. I placed the order, the next day I got an email stating they were out of stock.

So I wanted to get these by this weekend, but I thought, well still have time.. so I waited. This week rolls around, still no contact from Adorama, I check and the item is still on backorder with no idea when it will ship. I send them an email to inquire as to when it will ship, didn't receive a response. I didn't really want to wait another 24 hours so I went ahead and cancelled the order. Not a huge deal mind you, I mean sometimes things happen. I send an email explaining that I'm just not willing to wait any longer and that's why I cancelled my order.

But I put in a request to cancel the order and order it from someplace else instead. Then the "customer service" emails arrive. Only they are obviously cut and pasted from a template with my name copied over an [INSERT NAME HERE] section. It contains an apology, which of course is absolutely worthless because you don't cut and paste an apology if it's sincere.

So I respond back and point out that cutting and pasting an email like that really isn't good customer service, and that I really didn't appreciate the apology at all because it was so obvious that this was a cut and paste response.

I get another response back, with the exact same template cut and pasted again. Apparently the didn't even bother to read my response, or take even enough time to scroll down and see that they had already cut and pasted that response to me once before and that's actually what my response was complaining about.

So I respond again, a little more tersely this time, requesting that they forward my email to a supervisor or manager and that someone actually read it and respond to me with something other than a cut and paste email.

This time I get a different cut and paste response about their backorder system and how the website works in regards to back orders, etc, etc. Again it's pretty obvious this is a pre-written, cut and paste response and it did nothing to address my concerns. I was already well past caring about how they handled back orders, I just wanted an actual human being to take 10 seconds to read the one paragraph email I sent and respond to me. That was it.

I sent yet another email pointing this out, and as of yet I have yet to receive a response to it at all. It's now pretty much a full week since I placed my order, and so far I haven't even gotten anyone on Adorama's email team to give me a single, actual response to the issue I wanted to discuss with them - namely the fact that they have yet to actually read anything I've written and respond accordingly, instead they skimmed the email, found a keyword, cut and pasted what they thought was the right response and moved on.

Granted, it's not like I ordered a high dollar item. It's also not like it's the end of the world that they were unable to fulfill the order. In fact if I'd just gotten an honest to goodness, hey, sorry about that I wouldn't be here now. But I guess I'm just not to keen on giving any company my business if they can't even take a couple of seconds out of their busy day to give me an appropriate response when I send them email.

Just my 2 cents worth of course, YMMV

This is what Facebook pages are for post a few negative consistently over a few days, with enough specific detail to make the company look incompetent to the consumer, and the marketing shirts will get on the case quick enough