@MedicGrow
After commenting above I felt it best not to say negative things without giving the company a chance to demonstrate the worth of their product and processes. We placed an order for 2 lights on 3rd February with shipping to Australia included and quoted at $210USD.
After taking payment through PayPal your system errored and didn't give us an order number, or even a payment reference.
We twice contacted you using your online form, and got Kitty. Kitty doesn't say much (she actually says the same thing each time). She doesn't get back to us. After contacting you with the PayPal payment reference and gateway screenshots at our end which show payment has taken by Comdevi Electronics Co Ltd (which looks to be a holding company based in Hong Kong, related to an entity in China. There's a bit of a lack of transparency here, and if a US customer is expecting a light with a warranty sold from a US company (MedicGrow?) then offshoring the payment potentially means they have no US-based rights.
So, you got back to us asking for the payment reference. We told you we'd sent what we had and Kitty got back to us.
Instead of being asked to pay the quoted shipping fee on the website of $210USD, ($289 AUD) we were quoted a shipping fee of $300+ ($438 AUD), which we paid.
We finally saw some progress. On Friday we were told the lights would be shipped this week. Today (Wednesday night time, we were again emailed by Kitty to tell us we had to pay another $220, now to Growponic, Inc using SWIFT routing (International Bank Transfer), to the US company that owns the MedicGrow trademark.
While I understand shipping volume is expensive in times of COVID-19, if you're shipping them ex Asia it should be cheaper than shipping ex-United States. If you aren't, it feels like you could investigate that option.
At this point it's 3 weeks after an order was placed
and it hasn't been dispatched yet. We've paid $100USD more than quoted and now been asked to pay more money, apparently because while you failed to process the order the cost of shipping went up.
Current companies in the market from Spider Farmer to Fluence are known for 'American' standards of customer service. At this point, the purchase experience for us has honestly instead been identical to that of a honeypot scam.
I'm not telling you how to resolve this, but at this point my questions about this light remain unissued on the forums. My own company would have sunk/eaten the costs, thrown in the lighting controller for goodwill and hoped that the customer told people they had an overall good experience and the after-sales service earned another 10 or 1,000 lights - you have no idea whether I have a 1' x 1' tent with tomatoes or am trialling lights for a new medical cannabis facility.
Finally, you're now using the term "freight" instead of shipping. It's disappointing as this takes delivery from a point to point transaction to one where, presumably, if two lights get stuck at a port it could turn into my issue? Or is that not what you/Kitty meant?
Lastly, can we have some information about who MedicGrow are please? We're not all racist and we're aware that the pricing means not having a Good Ole Boy sales rep with an office in every state.
I apologise for taking this into the public domain but given the kind of issues here I thought how you resolve this might inform other potential purchasers of the current ordering issues. We thought purchasing a light from your website would give us landed lights to test within three weeks. Otherwise we'd have walked into another hydro store or bought from your competition. You'll be aware that no facility or even consumer wants these kinds of issues when yield and PPFD are so closely correlated.
thanks,
stonedfood.