Particle Store Sales Support Issue

General
1

Hello,

I apologize ahead of time if it is inappropriate to post this kind of message in the community forums; however, I feel the need to voice my frustrations with Particle customer sales support in public as I am not getting anywhere just by repeatedly contacting hello@particle.io. There should be a way to escalate the issue to a manager, but there isn’t from what I can tell.

This is the first time I have ever had any negative experience with Particle (or Spark for that matter), so I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt; however, the people (person?) who are responding to my e-mails are not being very helpful to say the least.

I had placed an order for 5 photons and 1 power shield back on February 5th. That was nearly 7 months ago! Now, I understood that this was a pre-order and it was going to be released months down the road and I am completely fine with that. What I am not fine with is having my order CANCELLED on me without any notice, especially since these items are supposed to be ‘on the shelf’ now. Apparently, the order was cancelled because I changed my PayPal account e-mail address between the time when I placed the order and when they attempted to charge my account (not that unusual given the 7 month time span). What is extremely frustrating, is that they did not even attempt to contact me about this issue (they have a valid e-mail address and phone number), they simply cancelled my order!

I could still probably live with the cancellation if it wasn’t for the fact that they now want to gouge me on shipping rates for any new orders. For example, my original order had a very reasonable shipping cost of $9.27. Now, to order the same items Particle wants to charge me $54.26 for shipping, which is absolutely ridiculous.

All I want is to receive my order and pay what I originally agreed to and not a penny more. I sincerely hope someone from Particle will see this post and resolve my frustrations, but I’m not going to hold my breath…

Sincerely,
DC

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2

Hi Daniel,

First of all, apologies for any frustration. We appreciate that you’ve been waiting a while for that particular order and that this has added to the frustration.

We’re in process of improving our entire e-commerce experience at the moment, and making it much easier to update and change as our products continue to evolve and as we develop new shipping relationships. Our team is actually pretty small but we are doing the best we can to fulfill orders rapidly and correctly but have obviously hit some stumbles along the way.

I’d like to explain a few items here (not excuse any of this, just give you more context and a look behind the scenes):

Regarding cost - our store shows the DHL payment first - which is why you see $54.26. There’s a dropdown menu there that will allow you also see the USPS payment.

When a payment order fails our system we wait 7 days and our system sends emails out alerting the buyer that their payment has failed. During this time, it sends several emails alerting the buyer that their payment has failed and providing directions to remedy the issue. I apologize if that email wasn’t received or went to spam.

I also know that you’re waiting on an email response to your Friday email - we’re doing our best to get to that today. We are not open on the weekends thus typically have a number of messages on Monday morning.

I am going to change the title of this thread to include Store so that others searching for similar issues can find it more easily.

Thanks for your support and patience with us.

Best,
Stephanie

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