Was just in White Lions Games yesterday to trade some stuff off, and they are really nice people. I had the day to explore Dallas and Fort Worth while a friend was taking a test. When I got there; my friend called to say they were done; figures! I was in a hurry then and employee there rushed my order for me to expadite my order (forgive me if I forgot your name). That was really nice. Thank you!
If you go there; have a list ready cause they don't keep singles in that shop, but location nearby for security.
Thanks Glad the in-store process is working the way I set it up and quickly.
So over a month ago I sold some cards to white lion games a site that I have sold cards to before without any problems. Usually it takes two weeks for them to process an order well this was in October and here we are in December and I still have yet to get paid so I email them. They say due to staffing changes they couldn't get to it they tell me this twice and then say they will take care of the order and yet they still have not paid me. My friend is a lawyer and she has agreed to help me should I wish to pursue this in court. The thing is I don't understand how a store like this can have such shoddy business ethics.
Julian have you been paid at this point and if you dont mind would you mind private messaging me your order number so I can look in on this and see what happened ?
With all of these negative reviews, why would anyone sell or deal with these guys?
Everyone gets negative press, I have always said that we get it in a different way sometimes than other places sometimes its the same, but when I see issues I always respond, I dont always get notifications from this thread ( i just got one now instead of seeing all these before from december ,
Not again!!
People need to stop buying/selling with these guys. Obviously they can't run a business correctly. How many issues has this place had compared to other shops? It can't all be customer error.
I'm curious, Was there ever a conclusion to DZRA's issue?
Certainly it is not all customer error, there are a LOT of sorting errors which cause delays, foils where non foils are buy listed foreign where english is buylisted very fine excellent and poor where near mint is listed LOTS and LOTS of errors but even I would not say it is entirely customer issues, many orders come in properly sorted and sent with order numbers inside and just take too long for us to process, period. I am big enough to admit it. Though I will say the sheer number of items that come in packaged with a name that doesnt match any incoming order name and no order number on or inside the package no invoice and no way for us to identify who we should be speaking with is bananas actually, so in those cases we literally have to wait for someone to contact us.
I will explain more below about what I have done and am continuing to do to resolve this since about May of 2013.
I would NEVER go to this store online to do business with them for any MTG product, unless I was getting a 90% discount on NM or sealed product, or they were buying my cards for 2x what they were worth on the secondary market...and ONLY through Paypal, and only with an agreement of an acceptable timetable of order completion.
From the experiences I read, the store either has the worst employees and day-to-day manager of online ordering ever, or the owner is a shady, greedy guy. Based on the positive things said about in-store experiences, it seems this store has a VERY POOR online business model, poor employees working the online store and a poor manager of the online store.
Ok here is the jist of what has been going on: In Early 2013 we bought a 144,000.00$ collection, essentially we bought a decent sized STORE out entirely. Directly after that we attempted to SHUT DOWN the buylist completely and found that that is not possible on Find Magic, Bidwicket, Crystal or Tcg its just not built in to the software to turn it "off" so what was done while we were going to be sorting and uploading 2.2 million cards, was setting the buylist maximum quantity to ONE "1". This was done to slow the incoming as much as possible while we put 4 people all day every day on sorting uploading cataloging and entering such a large buy, This project started in August, it took that long to just get it organized to the point that it could be engaged properly to upload. The collection was a 12' Uhaul stacked floor to ceiling riding on the axle because of weight its that much, its literally a 20'x20' room with floor shelves of 5,000count boxes it was daunting to say the least. That collection is nearly uploaded and complete now finally 9 months later. But still lack a few modern sets to be entered.
During that time here was our process:
1. Package arrives and package has a received date written on it in RED sharpie immediately that day next to a SHPD date so there is a RE-WRITING in RED sharpie of what day the item was mailed what day it was INV, invoiced and what day received that way there is clarity in ANY issue of when the entry was made, when it was shipped ( sometimes weeks later ) and when we first got our hands on it. So: INV DATE, SHPD DATE, RCVD DATE all written in red sharpie on the package.
2. All packages that are finished being written on if they are in good shape not damaged or missing items ripped open or anything weird ( happens sometimes but not too often anymore usps has gotten better about this in the past 6-12 months ) are digitally "checked in" via our automatic system, when we select Received in the system it automatically emails each customer THAT day and time that we have clicked this and puts it into a processing Queue for us to make ready.
3. Essentially at this point is about a 3 day wait while the packages that came in before todays packages get looked at, any condition errors, figuring out whos it is, missing cards, or any exceptions whatsoever are worked out at this point, then notes are put into the order that typically gets emailed automatically to the customer including an offer AND during this step an offer is mailed to the customer via manual email just to cover our bases.
4. Once we get an answer which sometimes takes a while typically 3-10 days to get a reply, here is definitely an area which could use improvement somehow because the delay sometimes in getting an answer causes extra delay in getting paid, we can't put the item in the payments queue to be paid unless someone agrees, because sometimes they would rather have a very fine card back for example instead of getting paid a lower amount for it, totally understandable, but still means we can't just throw it on the payments without agreeance. Once that is received we put the payment amount agreement date in a spreadsheet along with every other bit of information including the date invoiced date shipped date received amount owed and any notes.
5. Once a week the payments get sent out in order going down the sheet of who and what is owed.
There are places where things could go smoother and things we could do to fix things, SOME things are truly out of our hands, but I am not making an excuse for the times we are slow, those are mine and mine alone to deal with period. When employees fail its my failure plain and simple and I accept that.
I personally look at and monitor our facebook and am VERY active in the high end magic group on facebook also and nobody ever dealing with me directly in that group has had a bad thing to say, matter of fact most of the time I get involved personally things get worked out pretty much immediately for the most case. I am human and have my own faults to be sure, but my personal cell phone is always available for me to be called or texted, our shop phone is always on and I can be gotten to there also.
Geoff and Rob are the day to day managers if you ever should have an issue ask for one of them, Rob is Geoff's boss. Hopefully this provides some insight into how we do things and where things can fall down.
As an aside is anyone having any issues right this second I can help resolve ?
Adam, thanks for working with us to resolve your concern. We do what we can to resolve every situation we are able to.
In our case or I should say Magic the Gathering's case there is really only two pricing management systems, one is manual which is how most of the vendors work, which is what it sounds like a person manually updating prices which we do every week. We try to touch every card but with 10,000 cards its pretty tough even as a single person doing it full time. Then there is DPC or Dynamic Price Control which automatically raises and lowers pricing and there are some vendors using that, but I have found that most vendors using DPC that have a price that seems too good to be true, it usually is, if the "Margin" between what it sells at and what it gets bought at are too slim nobody can stay in business but DPC doesnt know how to differentiate and keep itself reasonable. So as you see its constant updating or letting the computer "decide" for you. We chose to do the a person works on it system but we are still human, though we will honor our prices 99.9% of the time, cards not being mint or arriving in a reasonable time sometimes have adjustments occuring but its definitely not what we want. We always want our customers to be happy.
No I don't think you really understand what is going on here... First I think you need to hire a PR rep. Should probably bring that up in your next "meeting". You are in the business to sell a product. In order to sell that product you need to have happy customers. 9 times out of 10 anyone who reads a review will believe the customer vs the business. Especially if they sound reasonable.
Unless you have some kind of built up positive reputation with a plethora of happy customers who will jump at defending you here I would suggest always sound apologetic and actually look like you are helping out every disgruntled customer. Instead you sound condescending and quick to blame everyone else in your company. Ultimately you are responsible to every employee who works under you and represents White Lion Games. You don't need to be privy to a conversation about whether or not your shipping manager okay'd for cards to be held. You should only be worried about having a upset customer and you need to make him or her happy.
I am not going to speak about this anymore... I don't think you get it... I was offended by your attitude towards your customer and your choice of words and how you decided to handle the situation. You being aware of this being the "internet" should also make you a thousand times more aware of how you should come off to people and probably watch how you respond. ALowe336 decided to post how he felt about IMO a true experience he had with your company. Your response to his review... "Well I just can't help you..." SCG. CFB, Capefear... don't have complaints laying around like this because they don't let it get to that point... your company some how does...
/rant
I understand perfectly what is going on here, I am only trying to illustrate that the customer and i WERE speaking directly about solving whatever the issue was that was outstanding and instead we are here talking about it in the forum, which I really dont mind but I dont understand how we went from talking directly to each other about getting what he wanted to this. Its literally like we didnt have a conversation already yesterday, but I know we did. I apologized that the issue occured and that we apparently can't help I seriously dont know what else to do when giving someone exactly what they wanted isnt enough...
I am responsible for everyone at the company including myself which is why I went around/surpassed everyone else to talk to Adam directly, and when I last went to sleep this issue was resolved and now its not and I dont know why plain and simple.
MagicMouse - I understand what your saying but I literally can't do more than say ok to a customers request for exactly what they want, then have this pop up here.....
At 1AM yesterday Adam and I spoke and everything was fine, he gave me the order # he put in for a card...
At 6PM yesterday he texted me while I was in bed barfing my guts out, food poisoning, that there was a problem, I replied this evening and said I was sure we could get him what he wanted without issue and not to worry.
At 5AM with no warning a complete reversal with no text to me or any communication beforehand, this posting here and as soon as I saw it I replied here and to him, again.
I literally don't know what else I could do, his original trade credit number was given to him, he said cool, he even said to me he wanted to pay the difference to get the an Underground Sea.....
Just got off the phone with PayPal and Chris and it seems like I might finally be getting this resolved. Possibly PayPal is to blame, possibly AMX... I'm not quite sure yet. Chris definitely put a lot of time into helping me try to resolve this, so hopefully it will get fixed and we can figure out what happened to that 250$. Thanks again.
Word, 3 hours+ and PayPal still no clue, I like how we will call you back is the answer, awesome thanks....
Very strange. Thanks for working it out on your end.
Dave
Dave, never seen something like that before but then again PayPal is weird now and then, glad I caught it, did you recently change address or just 100% them being weird ?
good job responding to everyone. minus the infraction.
i think all people really wanted was a response or explanation of some type.
Magic players are generally reasonable. i've gotten in trouble before for not responding... when the issue could have been worked out easily.
I can tell you care about your store's reputation. good sign.
Literally Did not know how to use the multi-quote button, my bad on that one. Yes not responding is the worst possible answer, had I known about this thread ever before I would have responded immediately, but a customer had to make me aware of it, I unfortunately work so much checking all the forums in the world for we messed up threads gets left behind and yes I care very very much about my store and its reputation in the business I always have. My desire to not be screwed over by so many stores people say are "great" and have exemplary service caused me to open WLG so many years ago. My initial company motto/mission statement was all centered around speed of completion, accuracy and mostly customer service before 2007/2008 nobody did anything or cared and we were basing our entire business on that concept. Now we made a few mistakes and hopefully we can eat some crow and recover plain and simple.
My roommate once won a 30 dollar credit for getting 9th at Nationals in DFW, Texas from White Lion Games. Nothing ever came of that. Never ordered anything after that.
Holynorth - why didnt your roommate call us to redeem his credit then ? Just as an FYI if it was never redeemed it doesnt go bad....I honestly don't know the situation here and I can't speak about something I dont know but if a credit was given as a prize lets get it rolling!!!
Don't unsticky this thread. Multiple stores offer similar discounts all the time, and previous poster have shown WLG to give cheap offers for redemption. Folks got on here to complain and reccomend that we avoid WLG business cause they found it was their only option. Some of these stories seem exaggerated (little to tiny), and others appear spot on. I have bought a few orders of cards from WLG and they took some time to arrive (2 weeks). I know USPS sucks, but am glad at least for receiving them. Commenters, complaintents, and folks who just got hozed; thank you for taking the time to warn us.
One fact that cannot be ignored about WLG that all the folks on here claim: bullying.
The WLG representative first appeared with a book of abusive counter claims that ment nothing, cause no one on here has returned with a positive answer to there claims after trust7 got on here. Also, "trust7"? this user name is a mental trick to scam you again. He jumped on her fast and furious to quite down the claims to run out everyone with a real issue. This is a typical tactic of con-artists. They use a "comfort tone name" and quickly take over a conversation to attain a few goals: 1st- use soft attack speach to upset folks with claims to fall into being the attacker, 2nd shift arguement so that WLG is the victim, 3rd respond to everyone in the future of thread like its an illegit attack platform. Lastly, start selling the business again on the thread to remove doubts of claims. It's a double counter con folks, cause they can't survive if they don't sell it harder.
I have watched this thread for a while and its looking like an episode of American Greed.
Not for nothing but my nickname I have had for 20+ years its a company that is the parent company of Greddy a performance parts company for import cars and everyone that knows me knows I race Rx-7's. Trust + 7 = Trust7 I have had that license plate on my car for something like 15 years, its not a scam or a word used for any purpose other than my love of Rx7's
I am going to make an order - thanks for the 10% off - and I promise to report back honestly on the transaction here as soon as it is complete. If a few others do so too, then I think we can start to make decisions on unstickying the thread.
Not sure what to do with that one.
Dave
UPDATE:
- Spoke with Martin in customer service. He was very helpful and said that they will call me as soon as this is resolved. Will keep this updated to keep you all informed.
Dave, check this out: I literally have never seen this before, Paypal had your payment held on a fraud alert and had it held because of an unconfirmed address that clearly above shows confirmed, I went into your payment and saw this, I have accepted the payment manually as that was an option below and put your order into shippable. Thanks for understanding and its on the way
As for the rest of the issues/suggestions I appreciate all of them and I will leave the comparisons to other stores out of this conversation, regardless of what they do or whether I agree its not relevant to the fact that we need to own our own issues, something I continually tell my staff. Thanks again.
The thread should stay, however the title of the thread could be changed to: Whiteliongames discussion or something. I'm glad to see some things being worked out here.
I am ok with that and yes please, we didnt steal anything and I am trying to work with every issue outstanding
I would be more than happy to write back here and elsewhere that this was just some sort of misunderstanding. As of now though, I am still waiting for any sort of response from you or any WLG representative. I can ensure anyone reading this that I did not exaggerate in the slightest and hopefully have conveyed that by posting large quantities of actual message logs.
The bottom line is that I received two payments for two separate deals from Chris/WLG. After a disagreement post- second payment, he attempted to overturn both payments. He was successful in issuing a callback on one of the payments (for 250$). I never received any money after that payment was called back and attempts to contact WLG about this have been met with sporadic or no response.
I am much more interested in receiving my money than I am in any sort of spitting contest. I cannot change the fact that this has been an ongoing issue for over a year. However, like I said, I'd be more than happy to be able to tell people that this was finally resolved.
(Also, I am very willing and able to discuss this whole debacle in detail with anyone. Feel free to message me and I can either give you my phone number or we can talk via messaging.)
Dzra, I have emailed you myself personally twice since your reply and gave you my cell phone # in PM so you could call at your convenience...
prices aren't bad. But i do suggest having a free shipping option. I know shipping is a pain for you guys....
the place i use now for all my online card orders charges about the same for shipping you do, however i have been using them for 10 years and they are run by a family so i care far less.
So... while the shipping isn't crazy. I think a free shipping option (100 dollars or more) would help.
As for your response. You could have been nicer. But I agree with most of what your points were.
There is a lot of bad blood on this thread. The 10 percent piece offering was a nice gesture.
You dont even know how badly I want this feature, its simply not something the database has setup as strange as it sounds. I can give a permanent CODE for that to work like a IF/THEN statement like someone said above IF order = 60.00> -X.XX to shipping or what not but I can't just set a 0.00 item......................actually you just made me think of something let me work on this.
Also the guy above that said free shipping if you place the order and tell me your order number I will refund your shipping.
C
I asked you to use the Multi-quote or edit buttons. Instead you posted 5 in row. Infraction issued, posts merged. -Galspanic
Unfortunately, I was done talking about this but since you mentioned me I might as well point out something on your statement since it is false.
It wasn't a month. I've timelined and outlined everything for anyone to read.
I was angry and justifiably so because it wasn't the first time it happened with your company. It was the fact that every time I sold MTG cards to your business, every time you got it after an abnormal time period and every time there was a price markdown on the total.
To blame the post office on the constant markdowns for the buylist "en-route" and horrible customer service is ridiculous to be honest.
Ok Brian pulled both your orders up so we can discuss it and I have the facts in front of me.
3 Orders you sold to us ?:
a. 11 March - 19 March, 8 days to us, 40.31 Original STU Total, 39.00? offered, paid next day.
b. 31 March - April 10, 11 days to us, 15.35 Original STU Total, $1.52 in damaged cards 13.82 and $1.00 adjusted, if I remember right we offered 13.00 11 days later, you accepted we paid a few days after.
c. April 1 - April 18, 17 days to us, 45.32 Original STU Total, 11.33 Each adjusted less than 1.00 each offer 42.00 even though we were losing money after this long.
If I have most of this right other than skipping the part about assumptions and tracking and such can you tell me what we did wrong here ?
In checking out it says 5 days to us so we can keep prices steady no package came in that time and we barely touched them still, willing to listen to where we failed but need some kind of explanation as to how you feel we did.
This thread has pretty much convinced me to never purchase from white lion games and to notify my friends to avoid their business as well. I know I've purchased from them at least once, and I'm pretty sure it was the only batch of cards I ever received late. But even if I had only ever had perfect transactions with them (which is possible), after this thread they will no longer get my business solely on principle.
Mastergee, interested to see what our speed was to Seattle would you mind seeing if you do indeed have a past order with us so I can look it up, would be helpful to me/us. As I stated previously we go directly to our Dallas/Ft.Worth postal hub to cut shipping time to an absolute minimum, im sure packages randomly take longer depending on USPS' feelings that day but would like to see if we were late on yours.
Yeah, not only is there a lot of evidence, but the manner is which this employee has responded is embarrassing. Heck, even if the customer is wrong, you don't talk to them like that.
Plus, minsarkers experience is terrible. I don't care if he got a deal, if he paid 7 a pop, and your played copies were 6 each at least give him that couple of bucks. You should technically be required to give him the new mint copies, whether or not you have them. You can't blame a repeat customer for being smart, understanding a cards interaction with another's, and knowing the market. Have your guys pay more attention to the game and maybe they'll understand what a card is worth, and what it will be worth. Instead they're to far up their butts trying to make the most profit.
Not sure what I said that is "talking to them like that" what are you referencing ? If you mean the CSM's original response I can assure you he was spoken to about it, but I can't come in here and discuss our reprimanding and training policies and be fair to everyone, I can assure you however it was discussed and is being discussed in an ongoing manner.
I had no problem offering something as compensation or credit for a situation where a customer isnt happy unfortunately I did not know anything about it at the time, nobody asked to speak to me and until I read this thread I did not know that this happened ( the response ) I always want someone to end up happy if we have a way to make that happen.
If doing something for minsarker now would help I would offer it, if he wanted something, but I dont want to be accused again of being short or facetious. Min happy to rectify and offer you something if you don't feel its too late if so, my apologies as I said already and I assure you I addressed it internally.
I don't understand, Chris, why you came out and defended yourself. You can't win. It doesn't matter what the truth is behind any of the stories here. You could be the nicest guy in the world just trying to make a buck, and you would still lose here because the customer is always right, even when they're not. Already you have users posting that because of your response, they won't ever buy from you and they will tell their friends. If 10 people read this and made that decision, and each told one draft pod alone about it, then that's 80 people that aren't even going to bother visiting your website, let alone buy your cards.
If you wanted to improve your image and/or community relations, why not come out here and take the high road? Imagine the following situation, instead of your response here:
Can you imagine how much better that would have gone over? Hell, I'd have at least visited your website to see what I was missing.
Fighting with your customers is like fighting with your wife. You can't win, you can only lose less. They don't care about your margins. They don't care about your long hours, your pricing policies, etc. None of that matters. If you had just taken the high road and tried to start over, instead of continuing this madness, maybe even I would have given you a shot. The fact is, I deal with another store that doesn't ask me how to treat the help, they simply get me my cards fast and for a reasonable price. No drama, no problems, and I go play Magic. If your store is capable of producing similar results, now is the best time to pledge to do that.
I ask this because I genuinely wonder what your perspective is as a business owner trying to salvage a customer/business relationship with the MTGS Market Street community. Was it really worth coming back here and arguing with customers? Was it a pride thing? Maybe you just wanted your voice heard? You must know that whether you are right or not, nothing good could have come from it. At least, not in a monetary sense.
I am glad you said this so I can clarify. I want to say up front that I wholeheartedly agree with you, arguing with your wife/my wife, is a dead end road lol. The only thing to be gained is more frustration and less non-stress time together honestly.
A few of the situations I wanted to explain my perception of how things occured and get the other persons thoughts on how they saw/felt the situations. In my personal life there is a measure of pride that I carry in some things but honestly pride is an overrated commodity, I have no problem apologizing when we are wrong and even when we aren't wrong honestly. I don't want to just come here say things without understanding perspectives, I wanted to explain how we saw a few things and get the other side of the stories then see what I can do about it.
One thing I want to note to everyone here, during my looking at Brian, Patrick and several of the issues here I noticed something. Literally most of these issues occurred at the first month of our new CSM starting. We had a CSM leave us with 2 days notice to move to Oklahoma ( following his girl ) and had to hire/train/bring up to speed someone very quickly and that was exactly during this time. I am not offering an excuse but a possible partial explanation, there is no pride in the way, no caring for my "voice" to be heard other than the aspect of people understanding we need reasonable solutions to problems.
I Had a guy ask me today to send a .33cent card same day express........
Do you know what that bill looks like ? $235.00, how do I fix that I can't I explained I could priority it give him more ship another free do lots of things, even if I wanted to I couldnt have gotten a same day out the door at 4:40CST. My point was only that we need reasonable options when things fail. My perspective is simply to look at and address each time we fail, myself included. We are a small business compared to most large online retailers Best Buy, Newegg etc and we do care about each and every one of our customers. Was it worth it, yes any information I get even from people still angry or angry again with us or me is worthwhile, you can't just stop learning or trying to grow.
We talk internally every day about customer service and how to make it better, anyone in this thread or forum that has had a negative experience I am sorry it happened no matter the circumstance we aren't sitting around chuckling about these things I take them to heart and we try to grow from them and get better every single time. No excuses but for those that experienced problems in the earlier parts of 2012 while bringing a CSM and the rest of a CS department up to speed I truly apologize and if I can do something to make it right let me know.
Well I think you've lost many potential customers due to this thread. All these stories seem completely legit and it's blatantly obvious that you attempted to rip these people off. Even if you didn't rip these guys off these experiences still make you look bad. I will tell anyone looking to buy cards online to look somewhere else so they can avoid the possibility of being ripped off.
I am sorry you feel all of the stories are legitimate as some are and some are not, I'm also sorry you feel whatever 10000000000th of 1 percent these issues represent, completely gives you full understanding of me personally and us as a company, I respect everyones right to make their own opinion. However I would urge you to use a little more research in your future opinions than one thread or even five threads. When I look into problems I always check and check myself with the people in control of my situation. I use USAA because of my military affiliations for insurance and they nearly lost my business this year because of an error they made which would be looked at very badly by anyone that heard the story, but instead of going bonkers on their facebook or some thread I called them and spoke to their resolution department and yes, it was a beating dealing with them it took a month and a week to resolve, but they resolved it, and I as a good customer stayed with them during the attempts to resolve it, I didnt say piss off and leave I didnt curse them up and down, was I mad ? Hell yes I was mad, been with them a LONG time and done lots of business with them as a loyal customer because of the way they have taken care of me when I could have left for cheaper rates from Toyota, Ducati, Nissan, Mazda and many many more.
The point I am making is this; if you want to be reasonable and your desire,request,business IS reasonable give businesses, including us, the chance to make things right. MOST businesses and people in general if you give them a chance will try to do right by you, including us. I am not speaking of single people on craigslist, I do mean be careful, but with hundreds of thousands of orders and feedback and 15+ years in the business with insanely good reviews even FROM people with repeated problems we can't just be lying or trying to rip people off, think about it.
Stores and businesses that do that don't exist long or they have to change names, BigF**********, and then try again. Same name, same people, same desire to make situations right and as soon as Im done with this im going to again reply to Dzra in private because we DONT stop trying and thats all there is to it.
Chris, I understand coming to this thread to try to save face, and I can respect that. Star City Games, Channel Fireball, and Cape Fear Games all do the same thing and will always happily rectify the situation. HOWEVER, the WORST thing that you could do in this situation is to turn and make inflammatory remarks towards one disgruntled customer, ESPECIALLY when one of their complaints is about you or your staff becoming inflammatory towards him. Instead of taking the high road and saying that "This was a complex situation that may or may not have been handled well by either party, and future situations similar to this, if they do occur, will be handled differently," you chose to be chiding, to fling accusations, and to take no responsibility for the actions of yourself and your company. I share the same sentiment as 4thDimentionalBubble.
I am sorry you don't see the entire situation but I as I have already said will not go into this ONE situation but all of us here are human beings and at the point where cursing calling people names and threatening people comes into play, the service is done and gone, NOBODY can deal with that at that level, we want EVERY customer we have except the ones that, again as I have said over and over, don't want to try to be reasonable and are only trying to hurt us or damage a situation. Somehow in your statements you think because we are a business we aren't human beings and can't be affected or hurt or frustrated, thats just not even reasonable man.
We aren't Robots and neither is anyone you think should be ok with you screaming and cursing at them on the other end of the phone, I simply can't agree with you here.
Any chance I ever would have purchased from this store was eliminated by the manner in which trust7 has responded to his customers.
Huktonfonix - Sorry you feel that way, I attempted to address every single person with a complaint and even attempted to address one very bad situation that I feel we were treated badly in as a way to again try to repair that situation. As I said above we are human beings and desire to make our people happy as can be, things happen and if you understand that then let us try to make you happy.
Listen, the real bottom line is that mostly in life WE are our biggest critics, if you guys somehow think I don't get on all the managers and employees cases when these things happen weekly, daily, monthly, your dead wrong. We talk more about our processes than the entire combined group of people talk about our processes I promise you that. We have dynamic reports that run every week that discuss errors in shipping, inventory, damage and 10 others that we graph look at discuss and adjust to resolve, thats not the mark of a company or person, ME, that doesn't care about its customers plain and simple. Nobody can beat me up worse than I beat myself up when we make a mistake, I already feel bad the instant the phone rings, I CRINGE every time a situation is bad for a customer, this week we mispriced Geralf's Messenger at 2.59 because the person entering transposed the 2 and 5 when clearly 5.29 was the right price, guess what, shipped 38 of them, ALL of them we had in stock we didnt cancel any order that we could fill AND we oversold once in amazon and once in TCGplayer, so I went and cracked some Dark Ascension and lost more money trying to fill as many as we could. But nobody sees that, nobody cares we lost 300-400 on that deal, nobody says hey I see i "got you guys" and thanks for the cheap cards.......It was our mistake I own it so we move on.
Lets just agree the way its setup isn't exactly fair for treating people in business with the greatest of respect and that when it goes too far, we still, are human beings.
If you want Robots buy everything you buy from big companies and the attempt at real service will die, along with competition and a good economy, I hope that isn't what we all want, I know I don't. I think if I am mad and I get upset with someone I want them to know im upset, but what I want most is for them to help me fix what went wrong, but then again I am not out to scam, beat, shark or whatever else out of the places I do business with, I know they have a hard enough time without that.
All of this is perspective and regardless I appreciate every criticism and comment I truly do, thanks to the good positive and good negative comments guys, Thanks sincerely.
I messaged you my phone number and an email address you can reach me. Feel free to provide whatever evidence you think you have that you paid me, but I am telling you for a fact that after you lied to your credit card company and reversed the 250$, I haven't seen a cent of it.
I am going to read your message and get with you to show you the payment sent and resolve anything outstanding with this.
Chris
Instead of quadruple posting please feel free to use the mutli-quote function or edit your replie into a single post. Thank you. Posts merged. -Galspanic
i read everything. Your response looks legit. Might I suggest next time you monitor this thread or mtgs. I'm surprised it took this long for someone to tell you about the thread.
Looks like things got out of hand very quickly.
your name sort of got dragged through the mud. I agree with you on most of the arguments.
i especially agree when you say players try to take advantage of us all the time. Sharks are sharks. what can you do?
Thanks Kirin,
I was surprised it took that long for someone to tell us too actually when I first saw it because the customer said it I thought "2010" what the heck!
What's weird is people think because we are a company or that anyone is a company (small businesses I'm speaking of here) that we can fend off the sharks, people find new exciting ways to steal from us every day, EVERY single day. That's just part of being in business but when situations come up you always are trying to understand situations and work with people but sometimes people don't seem to want "reasonable" sometimes they want you to send their 16 ordered Huntmaster of the Fells when you sold 48 sold out AND oversold AND they broke the rules buying that many. Actually had a guy literally say to me on the phone WHILE I was apologizing for him breaking he rules that he expected us to buy 12 more Huntmasters at 18.00 or 24.00 whatever they were that day and send them to him......
I do have to say though 99.9% of people when you say your sorry we messed up and how can we make it right, they respond positively and make suggestions on how they could be happy and that's all we look for is how to correct and make people happy in good and when we mess up. No company is perfect, newegg, sears, amazon all of them have messed up things some badly it's the recovery I look for us to try to be good at and even there sometimes things happen, postal errors and the whole nine. I remember a couple years back the local post bending a guys package of 4 Mindsculptors in half IN HARD CASES ugh lol USPS paid for that one heheheheh
A customer sent me the link to this thread just today.
Witch King - I do not get the time to read MTGS as much as I should I work about 70 hours a week, most of that time is spent resolving issues the managers bring to me from day to day business along with normal database website service stock collections paying taxes and so forth that goes along with running a business.
I am going to try to address a lot of what is in this thread then ask for a suggestion at the end about one of the issues that seems to be a common thing in the thread, the buylist.
Joe - Joe asked us to send a check as payment which is something we do not do plain and simple, there is more to the issue including me trying to make Joe happy by doing something we don't do instead of just shipping the cards back or agreeing to send paypal to a friend of his which he was very not happy about that premise, I simply should not have agreed to break policy this was my fault entirely and I apologized profusely for the time, there was never an intention to steal his cards simply received a package with a payment option that wasnt an option, simply put.
Patrick - The foil engineered explosives situation was resolved ultimately and the packs sent as extras were not meant as an insult but as a sincere apology for the time delay if Patrick had called or emailed and said he wanted something else I would have obliged but he was agitated from day one and from our first conversation there wasnt much I could do to help. I feel as though this situation started with the assumption we literally just didnt care about his order and that would be wrong, If I recall including purchasing 4 more explosives at 40-50.00 plus shipping each to rectify the original lost order two packages shipping the lost cards and time we lost something on the order of 400-500.00 in cards and time to attempt to fix the situation. Patrick was rightfully angry on first contact but I would suggest anyone dealing with any store not just assume outright they dont care about you.
Stop for two seconds and look at our feedback, Ebay, TcgPlayer, Amazon, Bidwicket, Findmagiccards, our own site, we have 10's of 10's of 10's of THOUSANDS of feedbacks, do you guys REALLY think our idea of customer service is reflected perfectly here inside this thread ? Amazon TCG and Bidwicket literally will not keep you online with a running account if you do some of the things stated here or dont take care of people at the level being discussed. We want very much to take care of our customers. Maybe being yelled at by crack heads ( yes it has happened, TWICE ) causes us on days to be frustrated, keep in mind we are human beings. I simple statement of something reasonable you want as a solution if we can do it, we will, period.
We want our customers experiences to be swift and pleasant and we do a lot of things to try to make that happen.
Bacepi - You sent a package to us in an envelope and got angry with us for the time and adjustment when it showed up more than a month later...I didnt put the statement of tracking for no reason, our post IS bonkers locally and we have done what we can to not use them.
SocalPsych - LOL "These are lies. My tea company ships similar volume of packages and we only have problems with 1 in 800/1,000. Most of the time these few mistakes are simple to resolve.
Oh just don't ship to Berkeley CA, their USPS is unbelievably bad."
You straight up say you know a certain postal office is horrible but when we say exactly what you just said then its just these are lies, comon man.... This isnt even a reasonable statement. We drive 45 miles a day to the Fort Worth Hub processing center, EVERY DAY, to ship our packages because the 6 post offices locally in each city near us could not stop losing packages or damaging them, it wasnt a decision made lightly as it costs a lot of time and money for us to do this, has nobody ever wondered how they get from ship date to delivered so fast from us most of the time ? Also we have less damage and loss claims this way. Our local post which we stopped using many many years back was on the order of 10-20 out of 100 lost or damaged, YES 10-20% sounds absurd right. Regardless point is our post IS bananas which is why we ask for tracking and ship from Fort Worth Central Processing.
Bamzing - I can't really reply to you properly about speed when I don't know what country you are referring to your profile states unknown country. ( or city/state ) if you have any order numbers i would be happy to look at the speed they shipped just for my own edification. The USPS is the only "reasonable" option we have in the US for shipping outside the US and the cost and speed are horrendous, we literally charge less and lose money on EVERY single shipment outside the US to attempt to mitigate the time and cost for our international customers.
Minsarker / Minhazur - Prismatic Omen was out of stock when you bought the last ones, you werent the only one "speculating" and they were cheap no big deal there. Geoff wasn't really replying that he didnt care, I remember this situation clearly, he was reply with the options we had to take care of you. The options unfortunately did not include replacing Omens with ones we didnt have as we were out, I apologize his language was unclear or frustrating it was certainly not his intent I am certain.
Jeffbcrandall - Min bought us out and we didnt send worse ones we just sent the ones listed as NM that we had left in stock, simply possible one or two slid through a massive collection graded improperly, I never got to see them.
Dzra - I really do not want to address this but in the interest of clarity and honesty I will. You posted half the conversation and YOU KNOW IT, you stole from us THEN you sent me the first message stating; oh well dude too late now sorry about your junk TOO BAD SO SAD, have to find the email to Quote you but you straight out flat out said you KNEW you jacked us and you didnt care so why dont you come clean and tell everyone here the credit card chargeback was filed after that because you REFUSED to do anything, period. Then tell everyone EVERYTHING you sent that you said was mint was beat including the foils, THEN tell everyone you got paid even though you jacked us around. You took an opportunity here to defame our character on a bandwagon of people that had legitimate complaints and while we could have handled the resolution of this TOGETHER better don't put this all on us, you sent beat cards you said too bad and when I asked and asked and asked to help me resolve it nicely you refused and didnt answer 3 emails and ebay messages, do not put this all on us you know thats not right.
Jack - I don't have a good reply for second-hand or third-hand information from other people, we are a store front in Hurst/Richland Hills and including Shotokan we have been a store continuously nearly, with a few moves here and there, for 15+ years. If someone setup a meet somewhere that wasn't at the store, which I do know has happened a couple times like buying collections at a starbucks or something for directions ease or comfort ( many people have asked to meet somewhere the know how to get to etc ), then it was just to help different situations out.
Midori - Love the liquor, melon liquor is good, thanks for the compliments and others that compliment us in here and in our various feedback mechanisms thanks, hopefully if you ever have / had a problem we can rise to the occasion and repair it.
Now to the Meat of it;
Our feedback on Tcg, Amazon, eBay, Bidwicket, FindMagicCards and more, is very very important to us not because its a number or a situation of "measurement" its a measure of pride to us, you have to understand where this business came from. We / I was a major wholesaler for a LONG long time in this business before we opened the online portion and the policies and procedures we setup for how White Lion Games are a direct result of situations just like some of these that went wrong for us and how stores treated us as customers and we are still customers today.
As an example for you guys, we ordered Amulet of Vigors, ok I ordered amulet of vigors when I started to hear a little about the amulet/spring/titan deck doing something you may call that speculating etc, I bought foils and regulars at full price from 10 or 11 stores only 4 copies or 8 depending on what their policies were I was not trying to "get" any store and I flat out tried not to buy anyone out even though there is 100's of this card in stock all over the place. I do not speculate often anymore as a business owner I dont have the time to make "bets" any more, I used to be 100% and now without time to watch and play professionally any more I can't really be right much any longer ( last before this was Vorapede I still like this card though ).
Here is the punch line, a full 5 stores, which I am NOT going to mention because thats not how I think things should be dealt with, I think we as customers should approach our buying/selling with the stores, if we get bad food talk to the manager or owner go all the way up to find resolution, thats just my opinion then if nothing its your choice to talk about it online etc, which honestly I dont do much even when things are done badly to me I guess because I know just how hard it is, especially in a faily economy, to run a good business, I digress. FIVE stores flat out cancelled our orders here is the list of reasons:
1. out of stock ( showed like 60+ in stock ) still shows in stock
2. not allowed to order regulars and foils, ok ?
3. no answer no reply no email no response at all
4. no answer no reply no email no response at all
5. refund in notes of refund call us with any problems.
I sent an email to each store and literally no reply from any, several stores mentioned in this thread as "great stores" have done this to me and people I know literally 10,20 times, literally. I don't like that it happens and I don't like when it does when I just want cards, crap guys I play the game too. I buy lots of foils for my cube and edh decks that are hard to get and these days ( i hate to endorse another stores but literally ChannelFireball has never cancelled an order on me, they have their own problems im sure like everyone else, I have had orders from them take a month but never a summary cancellation like nearly every other "good" store.
We don't cancel orders when cards are sitting in boxes like other stores we just don't period its crappy and it sucks it happens to me enough for me to know. One thing most people probably dont understand though is the SEVERAL SEVERAL SEVERAL methods in which we can OVER-sell a card very easily. E-Checks from Paypal, Amazon Delayed Inventory, TCG Delay, eBay Auction buy it now but not paid immediately, Additional out of stock holds meaning a card is out of stock but the rest of the order is allocated out of inventory and held in one of the above situations. When you are dealing with so many things in time and inventory its literally just impossible for it to be 100% perfect all the time, if any part of that doesnt make sense ask I will happily post screenshots or show what I am talking about if need be.
Buylist:
I would like anyone who wants to reply with a WELL-THOUGH OUT reply about a suggestion for the buylist to please do, but first read what I have to say about it.
Adjusting the buy price down AND up for the market is how we decided to BE HONEST with our customers i know several of you have said in this thread you question our integrity and that statement im sure makes you wonder let me explain. We don't send shipments back when they come in and aren't in our favor, if you don't think stores do this you would be wrong, I have had it done to me 100's of times, YES HUNDREDS of times as well as our own customers coming to us after that has happened to them stating NOW they understand why we do what we do. See when a card comes in, beat up or not the right version ( Planechase not from the vault or whatever ) or foil when it should not be or vice verse we have to make a decision, some stores automatically return whole packages, some stores return sections of cards that are beat, some stores SCRATCH CARDS that are mint cite them not mint because they dont want to buy them at the price they stated and on and on and on. When peak prices would come and go and stores would hold my packages then refuse them or refuse parts or modify them in such a way, these things is what led me to our current policies, I just didnt like the lies and dishonesty about the marketplace driving the prices. Computers and humans aren't perfect theres no way for everything to be right, and those of you that don't think we adjust up you would be wrong, we adjust up daily in nearly every sell to us order we accept. The market does drive the prices and competition is good, I always thought having a situation where we match most buy prices would be advantageous for our customers, say you send us X card and its 4.00 each sell to us, when it gets here and gets processed like Huntmaster of the fells for example wouldnt you want a store to say hey you get 64.00 instead of 16.00 ? Watching and matching stores higher buy prices I always thought would allow customers to send us packages and not worry. Do you know that we have customers that send us packages every week with OTHER STORES' sell to us paperwork in them ? They literally check out from our store get a sell order and from other stores but send all 7 stores "packages" to just us because we do this. Sure if you sit and criticize the method with one card, you can tear us apart I get that, but believing we are sitting around "waiting for the market to equalize" the cards and we make money thats insane, literally insane. Someone earlier in the thread said it, that just doesnt happen, honestly in Type2 its mostly a how not to lose money game, seriously. Shaving dollars so we make a little profit is not making us millions of dollars, but I bet refusing packages that we dont like the condition of wasting our customers money and refusing packages that aren't in our favor would.
Clearly you can not have every single aspect of every single thing in your favor in life so do this think about what I have said and give me a suggestion and I will take them to heart. You tell us how to make a little profit on a card we buy ( 20.00 Card we buy at 13.00-14.00 then pay 10% - 18% depending on the outlet for fees netting us 4.00 - 5.00 profit then when the card drops, which they do say to 17.49, we then make 1.50 - 2.50) Nobody can exist on margins like that, nobody if you think other stores do you would be mistaken its a business impossiblity, literally, in retail that is. So think about if you dislike straight honesty as much as you all say you do in the form of honest adjustments up and down to market ( which by the way you can check yourself when sending us sell to us orders ) or if you think sending packages back ( just because it hasn't happened to you yet, do NOT think it doesn't happen ) is a better option.
You can't have a store hold to a insane price to buy not send the package back take all the not mint ones and all the things we are talking about and stay in business, be reasonable what you are all discussing is literally the worst of the worst of all possible options and how they are reacted to and worked with, I get that mistakes get made and I honestly want anyones feedback that wants to spend the time to discuss it, I would be happy to hear constructive feedback about the issue.
Keep in mind as a business, if you read through this thread or look at any business, I know you don't want to think of this but people have their own best interests in mind and because we are a business people try to take advantage of us EVERY day in any way possible. I am not saying we are out looking at everyone like that but again, as humans some days we are attacked more than others and some days we respond better than others. I am not going to sit here saying we are perfect I am just going to state that if you stop and take a minute to think that we are dealing with insane things all day long in business and that our ultimate goal IS for you to be happy then suggest something we can do, don't call us and say there's nothing you can do, nobody can help you that way and we want to help make you happy.
Also as I stated somewhere else I am always around if someone or something that you do not like or do not understand talks to you or happens in relation to our business please ask for me and I will do my best to resolve it.
I look forward to any reply from anyone about business, our policies or a situation I can do something about today to make you happy, I would like to think in 5 years the 112,000 orders we have done of which in total I know of about 30 or maybe 40 total we have made an error or had something or someone very upset with us is pretty good, but I know we can always do better, hopefully my 3 hour ten trillion whatever word email conveys that ideal. I apologize I did not know of this thread before and urge anyone EVER with a problem to talk to me.
Thanks if you read this monster and look forward to any reply.
Thanks Glad the in-store process is working the way I set it up and quickly.
Julian have you been paid at this point and if you dont mind would you mind private messaging me your order number so I can look in on this and see what happened ?
Tuesday - Saturday Noon - Midnight most days
Everyone gets negative press, I have always said that we get it in a different way sometimes than other places sometimes its the same, but when I see issues I always respond, I dont always get notifications from this thread ( i just got one now instead of seeing all these before from december ,
Certainly it is not all customer error, there are a LOT of sorting errors which cause delays, foils where non foils are buy listed foreign where english is buylisted very fine excellent and poor where near mint is listed LOTS and LOTS of errors but even I would not say it is entirely customer issues, many orders come in properly sorted and sent with order numbers inside and just take too long for us to process, period. I am big enough to admit it. Though I will say the sheer number of items that come in packaged with a name that doesnt match any incoming order name and no order number on or inside the package no invoice and no way for us to identify who we should be speaking with is bananas actually, so in those cases we literally have to wait for someone to contact us.
I will explain more below about what I have done and am continuing to do to resolve this since about May of 2013.
Ok here is the jist of what has been going on: In Early 2013 we bought a 144,000.00$ collection, essentially we bought a decent sized STORE out entirely. Directly after that we attempted to SHUT DOWN the buylist completely and found that that is not possible on Find Magic, Bidwicket, Crystal or Tcg its just not built in to the software to turn it "off" so what was done while we were going to be sorting and uploading 2.2 million cards, was setting the buylist maximum quantity to ONE "1". This was done to slow the incoming as much as possible while we put 4 people all day every day on sorting uploading cataloging and entering such a large buy, This project started in August, it took that long to just get it organized to the point that it could be engaged properly to upload. The collection was a 12' Uhaul stacked floor to ceiling riding on the axle because of weight its that much, its literally a 20'x20' room with floor shelves of 5,000count boxes it was daunting to say the least. That collection is nearly uploaded and complete now finally 9 months later. But still lack a few modern sets to be entered.
During that time here was our process:
1. Package arrives and package has a received date written on it in RED sharpie immediately that day next to a SHPD date so there is a RE-WRITING in RED sharpie of what day the item was mailed what day it was INV, invoiced and what day received that way there is clarity in ANY issue of when the entry was made, when it was shipped ( sometimes weeks later ) and when we first got our hands on it. So: INV DATE, SHPD DATE, RCVD DATE all written in red sharpie on the package.
2. All packages that are finished being written on if they are in good shape not damaged or missing items ripped open or anything weird ( happens sometimes but not too often anymore usps has gotten better about this in the past 6-12 months ) are digitally "checked in" via our automatic system, when we select Received in the system it automatically emails each customer THAT day and time that we have clicked this and puts it into a processing Queue for us to make ready.
3. Essentially at this point is about a 3 day wait while the packages that came in before todays packages get looked at, any condition errors, figuring out whos it is, missing cards, or any exceptions whatsoever are worked out at this point, then notes are put into the order that typically gets emailed automatically to the customer including an offer AND during this step an offer is mailed to the customer via manual email just to cover our bases.
4. Once we get an answer which sometimes takes a while typically 3-10 days to get a reply, here is definitely an area which could use improvement somehow because the delay sometimes in getting an answer causes extra delay in getting paid, we can't put the item in the payments queue to be paid unless someone agrees, because sometimes they would rather have a very fine card back for example instead of getting paid a lower amount for it, totally understandable, but still means we can't just throw it on the payments without agreeance. Once that is received we put the payment amount agreement date in a spreadsheet along with every other bit of information including the date invoiced date shipped date received amount owed and any notes.
5. Once a week the payments get sent out in order going down the sheet of who and what is owed.
There are places where things could go smoother and things we could do to fix things, SOME things are truly out of our hands, but I am not making an excuse for the times we are slow, those are mine and mine alone to deal with period. When employees fail its my failure plain and simple and I accept that.
I personally look at and monitor our facebook and am VERY active in the high end magic group on facebook also and nobody ever dealing with me directly in that group has had a bad thing to say, matter of fact most of the time I get involved personally things get worked out pretty much immediately for the most case. I am human and have my own faults to be sure, but my personal cell phone is always available for me to be called or texted, our shop phone is always on and I can be gotten to there also.
Geoff and Rob are the day to day managers if you ever should have an issue ask for one of them, Rob is Geoff's boss. Hopefully this provides some insight into how we do things and where things can fall down.
As an aside is anyone having any issues right this second I can help resolve ?
In our case or I should say Magic the Gathering's case there is really only two pricing management systems, one is manual which is how most of the vendors work, which is what it sounds like a person manually updating prices which we do every week. We try to touch every card but with 10,000 cards its pretty tough even as a single person doing it full time. Then there is DPC or Dynamic Price Control which automatically raises and lowers pricing and there are some vendors using that, but I have found that most vendors using DPC that have a price that seems too good to be true, it usually is, if the "Margin" between what it sells at and what it gets bought at are too slim nobody can stay in business but DPC doesnt know how to differentiate and keep itself reasonable. So as you see its constant updating or letting the computer "decide" for you. We chose to do the a person works on it system but we are still human, though we will honor our prices 99.9% of the time, cards not being mint or arriving in a reasonable time sometimes have adjustments occuring but its definitely not what we want. We always want our customers to be happy.
Anyhow, glad we could end up making you happy too
Chris
I understand perfectly what is going on here, I am only trying to illustrate that the customer and i WERE speaking directly about solving whatever the issue was that was outstanding and instead we are here talking about it in the forum, which I really dont mind but I dont understand how we went from talking directly to each other about getting what he wanted to this. Its literally like we didnt have a conversation already yesterday, but I know we did. I apologized that the issue occured and that we apparently can't help I seriously dont know what else to do when giving someone exactly what they wanted isnt enough...
I am responsible for everyone at the company including myself which is why I went around/surpassed everyone else to talk to Adam directly, and when I last went to sleep this issue was resolved and now its not and I dont know why plain and simple.
C
At 1AM yesterday Adam and I spoke and everything was fine, he gave me the order # he put in for a card...
At 6PM yesterday he texted me while I was in bed barfing my guts out, food poisoning, that there was a problem, I replied this evening and said I was sure we could get him what he wanted without issue and not to worry.
At 5AM with no warning a complete reversal with no text to me or any communication beforehand, this posting here and as soon as I saw it I replied here and to him, again.
I literally don't know what else I could do, his original trade credit number was given to him, he said cool, he even said to me he wanted to pay the difference to get the an Underground Sea.....
No clue, no worries we got it straightened out Looks like your order is to you maybe Monday from what I can see.
C
Word...
Word, 3 hours+ and PayPal still no clue, I like how we will call you back is the answer, awesome thanks....
Ryan, no worries glad we got to spend time together on hold with PayPal tonight trying to figure out why they have kept your money for 6 months....LOL
Dave, never seen something like that before but then again PayPal is weird now and then, glad I caught it, did you recently change address or just 100% them being weird ?
Literally Did not know how to use the multi-quote button, my bad on that one. Yes not responding is the worst possible answer, had I known about this thread ever before I would have responded immediately, but a customer had to make me aware of it, I unfortunately work so much checking all the forums in the world for we messed up threads gets left behind and yes I care very very much about my store and its reputation in the business I always have. My desire to not be screwed over by so many stores people say are "great" and have exemplary service caused me to open WLG so many years ago. My initial company motto/mission statement was all centered around speed of completion, accuracy and mostly customer service before 2007/2008 nobody did anything or cared and we were basing our entire business on that concept. Now we made a few mistakes and hopefully we can eat some crow and recover plain and simple.
Holynorth - why didnt your roommate call us to redeem his credit then ? Just as an FYI if it was never redeemed it doesnt go bad....I honestly don't know the situation here and I can't speak about something I dont know but if a credit was given as a prize lets get it rolling!!!
Not for nothing but my nickname I have had for 20+ years its a company that is the parent company of Greddy a performance parts company for import cars and everyone that knows me knows I race Rx-7's. Trust + 7 = Trust7 I have had that license plate on my car for something like 15 years, its not a scam or a word used for any purpose other than my love of Rx7's
C
Dave, check this out: I literally have never seen this before, Paypal had your payment held on a fraud alert and had it held because of an unconfirmed address that clearly above shows confirmed, I went into your payment and saw this, I have accepted the payment manually as that was an option below and put your order into shippable. Thanks for understanding and its on the way
As for the rest of the issues/suggestions I appreciate all of them and I will leave the comparisons to other stores out of this conversation, regardless of what they do or whether I agree its not relevant to the fact that we need to own our own issues, something I continually tell my staff. Thanks again.
C
I am ok with that and yes please, we didnt steal anything and I am trying to work with every issue outstanding
Dzra, I have emailed you myself personally twice since your reply and gave you my cell phone # in PM so you could call at your convenience...
You dont even know how badly I want this feature, its simply not something the database has setup as strange as it sounds. I can give a permanent CODE for that to work like a IF/THEN statement like someone said above IF order = 60.00> -X.XX to shipping or what not but I can't just set a 0.00 item......................actually you just made me think of something let me work on this.
Also the guy above that said free shipping if you place the order and tell me your order number I will refund your shipping.
C
I asked you to use the Multi-quote or edit buttons. Instead you posted 5 in row. Infraction issued, posts merged. -Galspanic
I have offered to try to make it right with any of the people here and per your suggestions here you go.
Orders placed on our website directly not 5 but 10% off to MTGS for the next couple days.
www.whiteliongames.com Add items during checkout when coupon / add code comes up put: "MTGS10" in the box.
C
Ok Brian pulled both your orders up so we can discuss it and I have the facts in front of me.
3 Orders you sold to us ?:
a. 11 March - 19 March, 8 days to us, 40.31 Original STU Total, 39.00? offered, paid next day.
b. 31 March - April 10, 11 days to us, 15.35 Original STU Total, $1.52 in damaged cards 13.82 and $1.00 adjusted, if I remember right we offered 13.00 11 days later, you accepted we paid a few days after.
c. April 1 - April 18, 17 days to us, 45.32 Original STU Total, 11.33 Each adjusted less than 1.00 each offer 42.00 even though we were losing money after this long.
If I have most of this right other than skipping the part about assumptions and tracking and such can you tell me what we did wrong here ?
In checking out it says 5 days to us so we can keep prices steady no package came in that time and we barely touched them still, willing to listen to where we failed but need some kind of explanation as to how you feel we did.
Chris
Mastergee, interested to see what our speed was to Seattle would you mind seeing if you do indeed have a past order with us so I can look it up, would be helpful to me/us. As I stated previously we go directly to our Dallas/Ft.Worth postal hub to cut shipping time to an absolute minimum, im sure packages randomly take longer depending on USPS' feelings that day but would like to see if we were late on yours.
Chris
Not sure what I said that is "talking to them like that" what are you referencing ? If you mean the CSM's original response I can assure you he was spoken to about it, but I can't come in here and discuss our reprimanding and training policies and be fair to everyone, I can assure you however it was discussed and is being discussed in an ongoing manner.
I had no problem offering something as compensation or credit for a situation where a customer isnt happy unfortunately I did not know anything about it at the time, nobody asked to speak to me and until I read this thread I did not know that this happened ( the response ) I always want someone to end up happy if we have a way to make that happen.
If doing something for minsarker now would help I would offer it, if he wanted something, but I dont want to be accused again of being short or facetious. Min happy to rectify and offer you something if you don't feel its too late if so, my apologies as I said already and I assure you I addressed it internally.
Chris
I am glad you said this so I can clarify. I want to say up front that I wholeheartedly agree with you, arguing with your wife/my wife, is a dead end road lol. The only thing to be gained is more frustration and less non-stress time together honestly.
A few of the situations I wanted to explain my perception of how things occured and get the other persons thoughts on how they saw/felt the situations. In my personal life there is a measure of pride that I carry in some things but honestly pride is an overrated commodity, I have no problem apologizing when we are wrong and even when we aren't wrong honestly. I don't want to just come here say things without understanding perspectives, I wanted to explain how we saw a few things and get the other side of the stories then see what I can do about it.
One thing I want to note to everyone here, during my looking at Brian, Patrick and several of the issues here I noticed something. Literally most of these issues occurred at the first month of our new CSM starting. We had a CSM leave us with 2 days notice to move to Oklahoma ( following his girl ) and had to hire/train/bring up to speed someone very quickly and that was exactly during this time. I am not offering an excuse but a possible partial explanation, there is no pride in the way, no caring for my "voice" to be heard other than the aspect of people understanding we need reasonable solutions to problems.
I Had a guy ask me today to send a .33cent card same day express........
Do you know what that bill looks like ? $235.00, how do I fix that I can't I explained I could priority it give him more ship another free do lots of things, even if I wanted to I couldnt have gotten a same day out the door at 4:40CST. My point was only that we need reasonable options when things fail. My perspective is simply to look at and address each time we fail, myself included. We are a small business compared to most large online retailers Best Buy, Newegg etc and we do care about each and every one of our customers. Was it worth it, yes any information I get even from people still angry or angry again with us or me is worthwhile, you can't just stop learning or trying to grow.
We talk internally every day about customer service and how to make it better, anyone in this thread or forum that has had a negative experience I am sorry it happened no matter the circumstance we aren't sitting around chuckling about these things I take them to heart and we try to grow from them and get better every single time. No excuses but for those that experienced problems in the earlier parts of 2012 while bringing a CSM and the rest of a CS department up to speed I truly apologize and if I can do something to make it right let me know.
Chris
I am sorry you feel all of the stories are legitimate as some are and some are not, I'm also sorry you feel whatever 10000000000th of 1 percent these issues represent, completely gives you full understanding of me personally and us as a company, I respect everyones right to make their own opinion. However I would urge you to use a little more research in your future opinions than one thread or even five threads. When I look into problems I always check and check myself with the people in control of my situation. I use USAA because of my military affiliations for insurance and they nearly lost my business this year because of an error they made which would be looked at very badly by anyone that heard the story, but instead of going bonkers on their facebook or some thread I called them and spoke to their resolution department and yes, it was a beating dealing with them it took a month and a week to resolve, but they resolved it, and I as a good customer stayed with them during the attempts to resolve it, I didnt say piss off and leave I didnt curse them up and down, was I mad ? Hell yes I was mad, been with them a LONG time and done lots of business with them as a loyal customer because of the way they have taken care of me when I could have left for cheaper rates from Toyota, Ducati, Nissan, Mazda and many many more.
The point I am making is this; if you want to be reasonable and your desire,request,business IS reasonable give businesses, including us, the chance to make things right. MOST businesses and people in general if you give them a chance will try to do right by you, including us. I am not speaking of single people on craigslist, I do mean be careful, but with hundreds of thousands of orders and feedback and 15+ years in the business with insanely good reviews even FROM people with repeated problems we can't just be lying or trying to rip people off, think about it.
Stores and businesses that do that don't exist long or they have to change names, BigF**********, and then try again. Same name, same people, same desire to make situations right and as soon as Im done with this im going to again reply to Dzra in private because we DONT stop trying and thats all there is to it.
Chris
I am sorry you don't see the entire situation but I as I have already said will not go into this ONE situation but all of us here are human beings and at the point where cursing calling people names and threatening people comes into play, the service is done and gone, NOBODY can deal with that at that level, we want EVERY customer we have except the ones that, again as I have said over and over, don't want to try to be reasonable and are only trying to hurt us or damage a situation. Somehow in your statements you think because we are a business we aren't human beings and can't be affected or hurt or frustrated, thats just not even reasonable man.
We aren't Robots and neither is anyone you think should be ok with you screaming and cursing at them on the other end of the phone, I simply can't agree with you here.
Chris
Huktonfonix - Sorry you feel that way, I attempted to address every single person with a complaint and even attempted to address one very bad situation that I feel we were treated badly in as a way to again try to repair that situation. As I said above we are human beings and desire to make our people happy as can be, things happen and if you understand that then let us try to make you happy.
Listen, the real bottom line is that mostly in life WE are our biggest critics, if you guys somehow think I don't get on all the managers and employees cases when these things happen weekly, daily, monthly, your dead wrong. We talk more about our processes than the entire combined group of people talk about our processes I promise you that. We have dynamic reports that run every week that discuss errors in shipping, inventory, damage and 10 others that we graph look at discuss and adjust to resolve, thats not the mark of a company or person, ME, that doesn't care about its customers plain and simple. Nobody can beat me up worse than I beat myself up when we make a mistake, I already feel bad the instant the phone rings, I CRINGE every time a situation is bad for a customer, this week we mispriced Geralf's Messenger at 2.59 because the person entering transposed the 2 and 5 when clearly 5.29 was the right price, guess what, shipped 38 of them, ALL of them we had in stock we didnt cancel any order that we could fill AND we oversold once in amazon and once in TCGplayer, so I went and cracked some Dark Ascension and lost more money trying to fill as many as we could. But nobody sees that, nobody cares we lost 300-400 on that deal, nobody says hey I see i "got you guys" and thanks for the cheap cards.......It was our mistake I own it so we move on.
Lets just agree the way its setup isn't exactly fair for treating people in business with the greatest of respect and that when it goes too far, we still, are human beings.
If you want Robots buy everything you buy from big companies and the attempt at real service will die, along with competition and a good economy, I hope that isn't what we all want, I know I don't. I think if I am mad and I get upset with someone I want them to know im upset, but what I want most is for them to help me fix what went wrong, but then again I am not out to scam, beat, shark or whatever else out of the places I do business with, I know they have a hard enough time without that.
All of this is perspective and regardless I appreciate every criticism and comment I truly do, thanks to the good positive and good negative comments guys, Thanks sincerely.
Chris
I am going to read your message and get with you to show you the payment sent and resolve anything outstanding with this.
Chris
Instead of quadruple posting please feel free to use the mutli-quote function or edit your replie into a single post. Thank you. Posts merged. -Galspanic
Thanks Kirin,
I was surprised it took that long for someone to tell us too actually when I first saw it because the customer said it I thought "2010" what the heck!
What's weird is people think because we are a company or that anyone is a company (small businesses I'm speaking of here) that we can fend off the sharks, people find new exciting ways to steal from us every day, EVERY single day. That's just part of being in business but when situations come up you always are trying to understand situations and work with people but sometimes people don't seem to want "reasonable" sometimes they want you to send their 16 ordered Huntmaster of the Fells when you sold 48 sold out AND oversold AND they broke the rules buying that many. Actually had a guy literally say to me on the phone WHILE I was apologizing for him breaking he rules that he expected us to buy 12 more Huntmasters at 18.00 or 24.00 whatever they were that day and send them to him......
I do have to say though 99.9% of people when you say your sorry we messed up and how can we make it right, they respond positively and make suggestions on how they could be happy and that's all we look for is how to correct and make people happy in good and when we mess up. No company is perfect, newegg, sears, amazon all of them have messed up things some badly it's the recovery I look for us to try to be good at and even there sometimes things happen, postal errors and the whole nine. I remember a couple years back the local post bending a guys package of 4 Mindsculptors in half IN HARD CASES ugh lol USPS paid for that one heheheheh
Witch King - I do not get the time to read MTGS as much as I should I work about 70 hours a week, most of that time is spent resolving issues the managers bring to me from day to day business along with normal database website service stock collections paying taxes and so forth that goes along with running a business.
I am going to try to address a lot of what is in this thread then ask for a suggestion at the end about one of the issues that seems to be a common thing in the thread, the buylist.
Joe - Joe asked us to send a check as payment which is something we do not do plain and simple, there is more to the issue including me trying to make Joe happy by doing something we don't do instead of just shipping the cards back or agreeing to send paypal to a friend of his which he was very not happy about that premise, I simply should not have agreed to break policy this was my fault entirely and I apologized profusely for the time, there was never an intention to steal his cards simply received a package with a payment option that wasnt an option, simply put.
Patrick - The foil engineered explosives situation was resolved ultimately and the packs sent as extras were not meant as an insult but as a sincere apology for the time delay if Patrick had called or emailed and said he wanted something else I would have obliged but he was agitated from day one and from our first conversation there wasnt much I could do to help. I feel as though this situation started with the assumption we literally just didnt care about his order and that would be wrong, If I recall including purchasing 4 more explosives at 40-50.00 plus shipping each to rectify the original lost order two packages shipping the lost cards and time we lost something on the order of 400-500.00 in cards and time to attempt to fix the situation. Patrick was rightfully angry on first contact but I would suggest anyone dealing with any store not just assume outright they dont care about you.
Stop for two seconds and look at our feedback, Ebay, TcgPlayer, Amazon, Bidwicket, Findmagiccards, our own site, we have 10's of 10's of 10's of THOUSANDS of feedbacks, do you guys REALLY think our idea of customer service is reflected perfectly here inside this thread ? Amazon TCG and Bidwicket literally will not keep you online with a running account if you do some of the things stated here or dont take care of people at the level being discussed. We want very much to take care of our customers. Maybe being yelled at by crack heads ( yes it has happened, TWICE ) causes us on days to be frustrated, keep in mind we are human beings. I simple statement of something reasonable you want as a solution if we can do it, we will, period.
We want our customers experiences to be swift and pleasant and we do a lot of things to try to make that happen.
Bacepi - You sent a package to us in an envelope and got angry with us for the time and adjustment when it showed up more than a month later...I didnt put the statement of tracking for no reason, our post IS bonkers locally and we have done what we can to not use them.
SocalPsych - LOL "These are lies. My tea company ships similar volume of packages and we only have problems with 1 in 800/1,000. Most of the time these few mistakes are simple to resolve.
Oh just don't ship to Berkeley CA, their USPS is unbelievably bad."
You straight up say you know a certain postal office is horrible but when we say exactly what you just said then its just these are lies, comon man.... This isnt even a reasonable statement. We drive 45 miles a day to the Fort Worth Hub processing center, EVERY DAY, to ship our packages because the 6 post offices locally in each city near us could not stop losing packages or damaging them, it wasnt a decision made lightly as it costs a lot of time and money for us to do this, has nobody ever wondered how they get from ship date to delivered so fast from us most of the time ? Also we have less damage and loss claims this way. Our local post which we stopped using many many years back was on the order of 10-20 out of 100 lost or damaged, YES 10-20% sounds absurd right. Regardless point is our post IS bananas which is why we ask for tracking and ship from Fort Worth Central Processing.
Bamzing - I can't really reply to you properly about speed when I don't know what country you are referring to your profile states unknown country. ( or city/state ) if you have any order numbers i would be happy to look at the speed they shipped just for my own edification. The USPS is the only "reasonable" option we have in the US for shipping outside the US and the cost and speed are horrendous, we literally charge less and lose money on EVERY single shipment outside the US to attempt to mitigate the time and cost for our international customers.
Minsarker / Minhazur - Prismatic Omen was out of stock when you bought the last ones, you werent the only one "speculating" and they were cheap no big deal there. Geoff wasn't really replying that he didnt care, I remember this situation clearly, he was reply with the options we had to take care of you. The options unfortunately did not include replacing Omens with ones we didnt have as we were out, I apologize his language was unclear or frustrating it was certainly not his intent I am certain.
Jeffbcrandall - Min bought us out and we didnt send worse ones we just sent the ones listed as NM that we had left in stock, simply possible one or two slid through a massive collection graded improperly, I never got to see them.
Dzra - I really do not want to address this but in the interest of clarity and honesty I will. You posted half the conversation and YOU KNOW IT, you stole from us THEN you sent me the first message stating; oh well dude too late now sorry about your junk TOO BAD SO SAD, have to find the email to Quote you but you straight out flat out said you KNEW you jacked us and you didnt care so why dont you come clean and tell everyone here the credit card chargeback was filed after that because you REFUSED to do anything, period. Then tell everyone EVERYTHING you sent that you said was mint was beat including the foils, THEN tell everyone you got paid even though you jacked us around. You took an opportunity here to defame our character on a bandwagon of people that had legitimate complaints and while we could have handled the resolution of this TOGETHER better don't put this all on us, you sent beat cards you said too bad and when I asked and asked and asked to help me resolve it nicely you refused and didnt answer 3 emails and ebay messages, do not put this all on us you know thats not right.
Jack - I don't have a good reply for second-hand or third-hand information from other people, we are a store front in Hurst/Richland Hills and including Shotokan we have been a store continuously nearly, with a few moves here and there, for 15+ years. If someone setup a meet somewhere that wasn't at the store, which I do know has happened a couple times like buying collections at a starbucks or something for directions ease or comfort ( many people have asked to meet somewhere the know how to get to etc ), then it was just to help different situations out.
Midori - Love the liquor, melon liquor is good, thanks for the compliments and others that compliment us in here and in our various feedback mechanisms thanks, hopefully if you ever have / had a problem we can rise to the occasion and repair it.
Now to the Meat of it;
Our feedback on Tcg, Amazon, eBay, Bidwicket, FindMagicCards and more, is very very important to us not because its a number or a situation of "measurement" its a measure of pride to us, you have to understand where this business came from. We / I was a major wholesaler for a LONG long time in this business before we opened the online portion and the policies and procedures we setup for how White Lion Games are a direct result of situations just like some of these that went wrong for us and how stores treated us as customers and we are still customers today.
As an example for you guys, we ordered Amulet of Vigors, ok I ordered amulet of vigors when I started to hear a little about the amulet/spring/titan deck doing something you may call that speculating etc, I bought foils and regulars at full price from 10 or 11 stores only 4 copies or 8 depending on what their policies were I was not trying to "get" any store and I flat out tried not to buy anyone out even though there is 100's of this card in stock all over the place. I do not speculate often anymore as a business owner I dont have the time to make "bets" any more, I used to be 100% and now without time to watch and play professionally any more I can't really be right much any longer ( last before this was Vorapede I still like this card though ).
Here is the punch line, a full 5 stores, which I am NOT going to mention because thats not how I think things should be dealt with, I think we as customers should approach our buying/selling with the stores, if we get bad food talk to the manager or owner go all the way up to find resolution, thats just my opinion then if nothing its your choice to talk about it online etc, which honestly I dont do much even when things are done badly to me I guess because I know just how hard it is, especially in a faily economy, to run a good business, I digress. FIVE stores flat out cancelled our orders here is the list of reasons:
1. out of stock ( showed like 60+ in stock ) still shows in stock
2. not allowed to order regulars and foils, ok ?
3. no answer no reply no email no response at all
4. no answer no reply no email no response at all
5. refund in notes of refund call us with any problems.
I sent an email to each store and literally no reply from any, several stores mentioned in this thread as "great stores" have done this to me and people I know literally 10,20 times, literally. I don't like that it happens and I don't like when it does when I just want cards, crap guys I play the game too. I buy lots of foils for my cube and edh decks that are hard to get and these days ( i hate to endorse another stores but literally ChannelFireball has never cancelled an order on me, they have their own problems im sure like everyone else, I have had orders from them take a month but never a summary cancellation like nearly every other "good" store.
We don't cancel orders when cards are sitting in boxes like other stores we just don't period its crappy and it sucks it happens to me enough for me to know. One thing most people probably dont understand though is the SEVERAL SEVERAL SEVERAL methods in which we can OVER-sell a card very easily. E-Checks from Paypal, Amazon Delayed Inventory, TCG Delay, eBay Auction buy it now but not paid immediately, Additional out of stock holds meaning a card is out of stock but the rest of the order is allocated out of inventory and held in one of the above situations. When you are dealing with so many things in time and inventory its literally just impossible for it to be 100% perfect all the time, if any part of that doesnt make sense ask I will happily post screenshots or show what I am talking about if need be.
Buylist:
I would like anyone who wants to reply with a WELL-THOUGH OUT reply about a suggestion for the buylist to please do, but first read what I have to say about it.
Adjusting the buy price down AND up for the market is how we decided to BE HONEST with our customers i know several of you have said in this thread you question our integrity and that statement im sure makes you wonder let me explain. We don't send shipments back when they come in and aren't in our favor, if you don't think stores do this you would be wrong, I have had it done to me 100's of times, YES HUNDREDS of times as well as our own customers coming to us after that has happened to them stating NOW they understand why we do what we do. See when a card comes in, beat up or not the right version ( Planechase not from the vault or whatever ) or foil when it should not be or vice verse we have to make a decision, some stores automatically return whole packages, some stores return sections of cards that are beat, some stores SCRATCH CARDS that are mint cite them not mint because they dont want to buy them at the price they stated and on and on and on. When peak prices would come and go and stores would hold my packages then refuse them or refuse parts or modify them in such a way, these things is what led me to our current policies, I just didnt like the lies and dishonesty about the marketplace driving the prices. Computers and humans aren't perfect theres no way for everything to be right, and those of you that don't think we adjust up you would be wrong, we adjust up daily in nearly every sell to us order we accept. The market does drive the prices and competition is good, I always thought having a situation where we match most buy prices would be advantageous for our customers, say you send us X card and its 4.00 each sell to us, when it gets here and gets processed like Huntmaster of the fells for example wouldnt you want a store to say hey you get 64.00 instead of 16.00 ? Watching and matching stores higher buy prices I always thought would allow customers to send us packages and not worry. Do you know that we have customers that send us packages every week with OTHER STORES' sell to us paperwork in them ? They literally check out from our store get a sell order and from other stores but send all 7 stores "packages" to just us because we do this. Sure if you sit and criticize the method with one card, you can tear us apart I get that, but believing we are sitting around "waiting for the market to equalize" the cards and we make money thats insane, literally insane. Someone earlier in the thread said it, that just doesnt happen, honestly in Type2 its mostly a how not to lose money game, seriously. Shaving dollars so we make a little profit is not making us millions of dollars, but I bet refusing packages that we dont like the condition of wasting our customers money and refusing packages that aren't in our favor would.
Clearly you can not have every single aspect of every single thing in your favor in life so do this think about what I have said and give me a suggestion and I will take them to heart. You tell us how to make a little profit on a card we buy ( 20.00 Card we buy at 13.00-14.00 then pay 10% - 18% depending on the outlet for fees netting us 4.00 - 5.00 profit then when the card drops, which they do say to 17.49, we then make 1.50 - 2.50) Nobody can exist on margins like that, nobody if you think other stores do you would be mistaken its a business impossiblity, literally, in retail that is. So think about if you dislike straight honesty as much as you all say you do in the form of honest adjustments up and down to market ( which by the way you can check yourself when sending us sell to us orders ) or if you think sending packages back ( just because it hasn't happened to you yet, do NOT think it doesn't happen ) is a better option.
You can't have a store hold to a insane price to buy not send the package back take all the not mint ones and all the things we are talking about and stay in business, be reasonable what you are all discussing is literally the worst of the worst of all possible options and how they are reacted to and worked with, I get that mistakes get made and I honestly want anyones feedback that wants to spend the time to discuss it, I would be happy to hear constructive feedback about the issue.
Keep in mind as a business, if you read through this thread or look at any business, I know you don't want to think of this but people have their own best interests in mind and because we are a business people try to take advantage of us EVERY day in any way possible. I am not saying we are out looking at everyone like that but again, as humans some days we are attacked more than others and some days we respond better than others. I am not going to sit here saying we are perfect I am just going to state that if you stop and take a minute to think that we are dealing with insane things all day long in business and that our ultimate goal IS for you to be happy then suggest something we can do, don't call us and say there's nothing you can do, nobody can help you that way and we want to help make you happy.
Also as I stated somewhere else I am always around if someone or something that you do not like or do not understand talks to you or happens in relation to our business please ask for me and I will do my best to resolve it.
I look forward to any reply from anyone about business, our policies or a situation I can do something about today to make you happy, I would like to think in 5 years the 112,000 orders we have done of which in total I know of about 30 or maybe 40 total we have made an error or had something or someone very upset with us is pretty good, but I know we can always do better, hopefully my 3 hour ten trillion whatever word email conveys that ideal. I apologize I did not know of this thread before and urge anyone EVER with a problem to talk to me.
Thanks if you read this monster and look forward to any reply.
Chris
WLG