Online Ordering?

Cody Fousnough

Cody Fousnough

Well-known member
We have now bought a few things, as in a new Electric Ear Wax Cleaner and Electric Nail Clipper, where the site never stated that these things were coming from China/Japan. Or, I just didn't research enough. Both were seen on Facebook, and "yes" I know, there are those that don't have and/or never will have, Facebook. The only way we find where the item is being shipped from, is when we get the shipping number in e-mail.

Has this happened to anyone else? IOW, you buy something online, perhaps even thru Amazon, and end up finding out that it's not being shipped from anywhere in America?
 
I've purchased stuff on EBay that ended up shipping from overseas, but that was a long time ago. I rarely remember to check the source when I buy from Amazon or Walmart.
 
Beth Gallagher said:
I got stuck with some ridiculous restocking fee on a return of something I bought from Amazon a couple of years back. After that I pay close attention to who the seller is.
Click to expand...
There's a whole "thing" about stuff coming from China. Unless it's changed over the past few years, they retain "Emerging Nation Status" so get subsidized shipping costs. It costs more to ship a package from New York to an address in North Carolina than it costs to ship that same package from China to that same North Carolina address.

Then there's the issue of China sending crap product, but many times you gotta pay return international freight to China, so most people don't even bother.

It's put American businesses at a significant disadvantage.
 
Well, so far, and I do mean "so far", we've been lucky when ordering anything on Facebook, but have received what we have bought. But, like I'm writing about, I didn't know we were buying something that was going to come from China, until I got a tracking number.

We were charged a restocking fee for something that we returned that was bought on Amazon. Then again, there has been a few things that we have bought online that we were going to return, but was told to keep and Amazon still refunded us what we paid. I bought us Support Stockings on Facebook, but we chose the wrong size. The company told us to keep those and they sent us the right size............. FREE. My wife told me, "Sometimes it is simply cheaper for a company to have the buyer keep the wrong item than to pay to have it shipped back to them." We had that happen with a small dog play pen we bought. After we decided not to buy a dog at the time, we contacted the seller and they told us to keep, or donate, the play pen and they would refund us. And, they did.
 
The only time I remember to look for the Shipper is immediately after conversations like this...then I soon forget.

For those who don't know, here is where you can see who the Shipper is. There are 2 different products: one shipped from Amazon, the other from the Seller.
P62KWIQ.jpeg
 
On both Amazon website and Walmart, when searching for a product you can select "seller" or "retailer" in the search parameters page so that you only see items shipped and sold by them.

@Cody Fousnough -- I'm glad you have had good experiences buying from Facebook. Hope you get your stuff soon.
 
Ken Anderson said:
Wanting to reduce the number of places that have my financial information, I mostly use Amazon if I am going to shop online, although I occasionally buy stuff from eBay.
Click to expand...
I just got my second notice in a month that my personal information may be compromised due to database hacking. The first one was from Med Atlantic, who manages billing for medical providers, and the second came from the government of the town I moved from in 2010. This is not a good trend. I had no choice but for them to have my info.
 
A year or so ago, I asked several online retailers to close my account, and they did, although I don't know if this automatically removes my information from their databases. It's not that I feel a need to be loyal to Amazon, but they do carry pretty much anything that I would order online, and usually at the best , or close to the best prices.
 
I only order online from Walmart, Amazon, and eBay. With eBay, I always choose the location to say “US only”, so I don’t get results from any other countries. On Amazon and Walmart, it shows who is shipping it, so I am careful there, too, although I have ordered a few items that shipped from china and it went okays except for the longer shipping time.

I like ordering my garden seeds and plant starts from eBay because I can order from a person who grows the plants and saves the seeds, as opposed to buying from a large company. Many eBay sellers are veterans, so I feel good about ordering from a veteran, too. eBay has an amazing selection of plants and seeds, some that are hard to find in a garden catalog.
 
Cody Fousnough said:
Yvonne Smith said:
I only order online from Walmart, Amazon, and eBay. With eBay, I always choose the location to say “US only”, so I don’t get results from any other countries. On Amazon and Walmart, it shows who is shipping it, so I am careful there, too, although I have ordered a few items that shipped from china and it went okays except for the longer shipping time.

I like ordering my garden seeds and plant starts from eBay because I can order from a person who grows the plants and saves the seeds, as opposed to buying from a large company. Many eBay sellers are veterans, so I feel good about ordering from a veteran, too. eBay has an amazing selection of plants and seeds, some that are hard to find in a garden catalog.
Click to expand...

have now bought a few things, as in a new Electric Ear Wax Cleaner and Electric Nail Clipper, where the site never stated that these things were coming from China/Japan. Or, I just didn't research enough. Both were seen on Facebook, and "yes" I know, there are those that don't have and/or never will have, Facebook. The only way we find where the item is being shipped from, is when we get the shipping number in e-mail.

Has this happened to anyone else? IOW, you buy something online, perhaps even thru Amazon, and end up finding out that it's not being shipped from anywhere in America?
Click to expand...
Everything has been MADE in China for years. I went into a kitchen utensil store a while back and asked for anything that was not made in China. There was not one thing. Although now SE Asia, India etc are selling more in America (walmart and amazon).
 
Ken Anderson said:
A year or so ago, I asked several online retailers to close my account, and they did, although I don't know if this automatically removes my information from their databases. It's not that I feel a need to be loyal to Amazon, but they do carry pretty much anything that I would order online, and usually at the best , or close to the best prices.
Click to expand...
I like Iherb for supplements although they don't have a few that I have found on amazon.
 
This has been a really weird day with my Walmart order. Two days, actually. I ordered online delivery order yesterday, supposed to be delivered between 4-6 yesterday afternoon.
But by 6, they said it was delayed, expected by 7. At 7, it just said delayed, and no idea when it might be delivered; so we just waited until bedtime and went to bed.

This morning, it still said delayed, so I called the Walmart store. They hunted for a while and told me that my order didn’t go to my regular store, it went to one on the south end of Huntsville instead, so they had no idea why it was not delivered, or even why it went to the wrong store.
I called that store, spoke to the manager, she said they had delivery problems last night, and it turned out that the delivery person just didn’t deliver several orders, mine included.

They said there was nothing they could do once the order was given to the delivery person, and they had reported the driver (not that this did me any good !), and told me to call the main office for billing to see about the refund.
I ended up with some guy (in India ?) that I could barely understand, was on the line with him for an hour, mostly on hold. He said that when he called the store manager to verify about my order, she insulted him and called him a scammer (he DID sound like one !), and he was all irate about that.
That didn’t help me either.

After telling him about 15 times that I wanted to speak with a manager, he finally transferred me to a lady that I actually could understand. She kept telling me that the driver had cancelled my order.
How can a driver do that ?
Anyway, she said if it was not delivered by 10 tonight (and of course she knows it is not because the driver stole my order), that then I can get a refund.
So, I have to wait until tomorrow and see if it shows my order is cancelled, and I get a refund or what happens next.

I am NOT a Happy Camper tonight ……..
 
Yvonne Smith said:
This has been a really weird day with my Walmart order. Two days, actually. I ordered online delivery order yesterday, supposed to be delivered between 4-6 yesterday afternoon.
But by 6, they said it was delayed, expected by 7. At 7, it just said delayed, and no idea when it might be delivered; so we just waited until bedtime and went to bed.

This morning, it still said delayed, so I called the Walmart store. They hunted for a while and told me that my order didn’t go to my regular store, it went to one on the south end of Huntsville instead, so they had no idea why it was not delivered, or even why it went to the wrong store.
I called that store, spoke to the manager, she said they had delivery problems last night, and it turned out that the delivery person just didn’t deliver several orders, mine included.

They said there was nothing they could do once the order was given to the delivery person, and they had reported the driver (not that this did me any good !), and told me to call the main office for billing to see about the refund.
I ended up with some guy (in India ?) that I could barely understand, was on the line with him for an hour, mostly on hold. He said that when he called the store manager to verify about my order, she insulted him and called him a scammer (he DID sound like one !), and he was all irate about that.
That didn’t help me either.

After telling him about 15 times that I wanted to speak with a manager, he finally transferred me to a lady that I actually could understand. She kept telling me that the driver had cancelled my order.
How can a driver do that ?
Anyway, she said if it was not delivered by 10 tonight (and of course she knows it is not because the driver stole my order), that then I can get a refund.
So, I have to wait until tomorrow and see if it shows my order is cancelled, and I get a refund or what happens next.

I am NOT a Happy Camper tonight ……..
Click to expand...
I am hopeful that AI might fix these processes. I think I posted an article earlier that said India is gonna be in dire straights when AI takes the place of their software developers and customer service reps. AI will have intelligible speech, and will get the problems fixed (if the AI-developed program tells it to do so.)

I wonder exactly what really happened if your order got diverted to a remote store that had a thief making deliveries. That sounds like orders were intentionally redirected so the one-time theft would yield more product.

I guess the next move would be to put a stop on the charge, or dispute it. I hate thieves.
 
Nothing had happened by this morning, so I started calling the Walmart Customer service again, and went through agents and then managers when the agents assured me that I just have to wait for a refund even though it has been three days, and they are oh, so sorry about that.
The manager was able to just process the refund this time, and it went through in under an hour, maybe less.

We drove down to the store and replaced the items that we had ordered, so no more hassles. I really think that if it had gone to our usual store in the first place, like it was supposed to, we would have had the order on Monday afternoon, and not had to deal with any of this confusion and delays. At least it is done ! !
 
Last edited:
Marie Mallory said:
We just ordered this cheapo recliner, but then again hopefully its better than the one I'm sitting in with busted springs.
Click to expand...
Last year, Bobby ordered a set of the cheap recliners from Amazon, they were not much over $100 each, and we really like them. They are nowhere near as heavy as the big old time recliners with all the heavy frames and lots of padding, and they are comfortable and easy to get in and out of. Not only that, they have a massage motor built in, so we can relax and have a nice massage with a lot of different choices of the vibrations.
This is what we have and we really like it much better than the large heavy ones.

 
On thing about online shopping that really bugs me but doesn't get a lot of attention is sellers charging my credit card before they ship. They are not supposed to do that. I did not agree to prepay an order, especially if they don't have the product on hand and are gonna use part of my money to go buy the item to later ship to me. They way the get around it is to print a shipping label, call it "Shipped," and charge my card. I'll get a "Shipping Notification" and go to the carrier's website to get an ETA, and for days I see "Awaiting Item From Shipper." One of the things I just bought from Amazon is in that status, and my card got charged..

I guess it doesn't really matter from a prepay perspective, since my credit card bill is for everything that got charged during that billing cycle, but legally it's not shipped until the package gets consigned to the carrier. I guess the credit car companies don't really care, as long as the merchant and the customer pay their bills. And I've always received the stuff sooner or later. But still...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top