Well, it looks like I spoke too soon about the great customer service over at 1ShoppingCart.com when I did a 1shoppingcart.com review a few months ago.  As a matter of fact, I seriously doubt that I’ll ever do business with them again.  Let me tell you what happened.

You may recall that I signed up for their autoresponder service last November (Here’s a link to the previous 1ShoppingCart.com review). I needed the new autoresponder for a list building method I was testing.  To make a long story short, I ended up having to close the 1ShoppingCart autoresponder because it wasn’t compatible with the test… through no fault on the 1ShoppingCart side.

In order to close the account, I had to call them on the phone and cancel.  In fact, I actually called them to cancel the account the same day that I ordered it.

As I said in my previous post, the young man that I talked to was a pleasure to talk to and said he cancelled the account effective immediately.  He also said that I would never even be charged because I cancelled the same day.

Hindsight is 20/20

On hindsight, I should have written down his name, gotten some kind of cancellation number, or asked for some other kind of proof that he had indeed cancelled the account… but I trusted the friendly voice at the other end of the phone and didn’t get any kind of confirmation.

And so I never really thought about it again.

You may remember that I’d been pretty much out of touch through the last half of December and most of January due to the prolonged death of my father-in-law, so I never really looked at my business credit card statements… I just paid them.

That’s why it really surprised me to receive an email notice on February 5th that 1ShoppingCart was about to charge their monthly fee.

What?!?!?  I cancelled that in November! So then I went back and looked at my credit card statement and found out that they never cancelled the account!

Okay, maybe this was an honest mistake.  I like to give people the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.  So I called them up and got a very different picture of 1ShoppingCart.com customer service.

The First Time I Called

The first time I called their billing department to find out what was going on, I ended up talking to a young man named Derick.  He seemed very nice… in fact, I think he was the guy I talked to when I cancelled the account, but I can’t be sure.

Well Derick wasn’t actually in the billing department, so he couldn’t do anything for me.  I actually got the impression that he was just answering the phones while the “real” billing person was away at lunch.

Okay, that’s kind of unprofessional in my opinion, especially of such a “big” organization, but I left my name and number so that the “real” billing person could call me back when she returned to her desk.  According to Derick, Ashley was due back from lunch in about 40 minutes and would call me back.

The Second Time I Called

So I waited about two hours… still no call.  Again, really unprofessional.

I called back a second time and Ashley answered the phone (who wasn’t nearly as friendly as Derick when she answered the phone).  According to her, she didn’t know anything about my previous call.  Instead of asking my to explain the situation, she put me on hold for several minutes to go ask Derick (the guy who forgot to leave a note) about why I had called.

Not cool.

So after several minutes on the phone, Ashley returns and says that she’ll cancel my account immediately and I won’t be charged for February… like that’s all there is to it.  In fact, she seemed completely caught off guard when I told here that I’d already cancelled this account and expected the previous charges to be refunded.

Well, Ashley flatly said that she couldn’t do that.  When I asked why, she had no answer.  After going around and around with her a couple of minutes, it dawned on me that maybe Ashley didn’t actually have the authority to refund my money.

So I asked her… she side-stepped the question.

Well, by this time I’m getting a little frustrated.  Clearly I’m not going to get anywhere with Ashley.  So then I asked to speak to someone who has the authority to issue the refunds.  She claims that no one can give me a refund (but no reason as to why).

“Well then, I’d like to speak to your boss,” I say.

Ashley comes back with a “if you really think that’s necessary” and puts me on hold for several more minutes.  So while I’m sitting on hold waiting for the next guy in the chain, I’m imagining the conversation between Ashley and her boss about how ridiculous my request is and how she’s done everything she could do, etc.  I was almost starting to feel sorry for her because I was absolutely certain that 1ShoppingCart would do the right thing and refund those monthly fees that I shouldn’t have been charged for in the first place.  There was no gray area here as far as I was concerned.

Now I’m Talking To The Boss

So after several minutes on hold, Steven answers the phone.  He never identified his position in the company, so I don’t know if he was Ashley’s boss, a manager of some type, or a janitor… another point of unprofessionalism in my book.

So I flatly ask him, “What can you do for me here?”

Absolutely nothing.  My account has been canceled and will not be charged again (Oh, I’ve heard that one before!)

This is what he said over the course of a several minute conversation:

1.  Steven tells me that there was no note left in my account in November to confirm that I’d canceled. (I guess I’m just supposed to roll over because some minimum wage customer service rep forgot to write it down!)

I challenged him to look at his logs… I’ve never logged into the account since that day in November.

2.  Our service has been available for you to use since November, therefore we have every right to charge you for it. (I guess he forgot about the fact that I canceled the account and therefore revoked his right to charge me anything.  It’s certainly not my problem if they didn’t follow up and deny me access to the account.)

3.  I can’t refund your money past 30 days. (This is an out and out lie.  Anyone who has ever had a merchant account knows that you can easily post refunds to customers well past 30 days.  I’ve personally refunded money over 90 days because a customer had extenuating circumstances.)

As you can probably tell, I was starting to get a little hot at this point… it was all so ridiculous!  I guess that Steven and 1ShoppingCart think that they’re holding all the cards.

So this is what I told Steven, “Look, you’re forcing me into a chargeback situation if you won’t do the right thing here.  That’s a lot of headache for both of us.  You and I both know that credit card companies usually take the side of customers over merchants if there’s any question at all about the validity of the charge.  So if I request a chargeback, it’s going to cost your company a lot more than it would if you simply do the right thing and refund these charges yourself.”

Steven’s response, “You’ll have to do whatever you need to do.  There’s no need to threaten me.”

“It’s not a threat, it’s reality.  Plus the fact that I will be sure to tell everyone that I can possibly tell about how your company does business and how it treats it’s customers.  That’s a lot of ill-will for your company.”

Steven clearly didn’t care about his company’s reputation.

I asked him if that was his final word on the issue… he said it was.

So Here We Are

So now here we are… spending a lot of time talking about how poorly a company handled a very simple customer problem.  I bet I’m not the first to run into this problem with them… but maybe my post here will make me the last.

I sure hope so.

I’ve disbuted all the charges from 1ShoppingCart.com with my credit card company.  It can take several weeks to hear back on these kinds of things, so I’ll let you know if I get my money back or not.

If I do get my money back, 1ShoppingCart.com will have to refund my money ($29.95) plus they will be charged a $25 chargeback fee for each unauthorized charge.  I’m pretty sure I’ll get part of it back, but my credit card company may not refund my November charges because it was more than 60 days ago… we’ll have to wait and see.

At this point, it’s not so much about the money as it is about the principle of the issue.

What ever happened to “The Customer Is Always Right?”

1ShoppingCart.com has been around a long time, so maybe they think that they can afford to create bad feelings with their customers.

You know the old addage, “A happy customer tells a friend, an unhappy one tells 10 friends.”

Now that we have the internet, it’s possible to tell thousands of people about a bad experience with a company… not just 10.  I guess the “customer service” people over at 1ShoppingCart.com forgot about that.

Some Pointers…

1.  Log every call you make to other companies… especially when it has to do with billing.

This is something that I used to do in the old days when more was handled by phone.  I’ve since gotten out of the practice because most of my correspondence is through email.

2.  Always write down who you talked to, their number or extension, and any promises they made.

3.  Ask for a reference number whenever possible.

Following these simple steps will let the person you’re talking to know that you will hold them personally accountable for the conversation and it will provide you with the information you need to back up your claims later if there is a problem.

I sure wish I’d followed my own advice on this one!

So, what do you think?

Am I completely off-base on this one or did I hit the nail on the head?

Should I have just paid their fees and dropped it?

Was writing this post a mistake or a notice to others to use caution?

Arvada on iTunes!

Update on 2/11/09

When I checked my email this morning the little gem below was waiting for me.  I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Michael from 1ShoppingCart.com emailed me this note:

“Hi Arvada,

I looked into your accounts on 1ShoppingCart and found the source of your account closure problem.

It looks like you actually had 2 active accounts on our system as of November 2008, one registered as an affiliate account, and the other as an autoresponder account (actually, I found 3 others that look like yours also, two opened at the end of 2003, and one in 2005, all expired or closed)

On November 13th, Derrick closed the affiliate account and either didn’t find, or didn’t know about the other account, which stayed open and continued to bill you.

I have verified that your AR package account has now been closed, and I’ve refunded the latest transaction on the account. We will have to mail you a check for the first $29 payment though, and will send it to the address you have on file.  Unfortunately it’s true that we can only refund within 30 days from our application and anything beyond 30 days we have to send a check for.

And while either of us could be at fault for the confusion over the multiple accounts, you should never have received the experience you did when calling in to follow-up with this issue.  For that I’d like to apologize and assure you that our management team will be taking this up with the staff involved.

If there is anything else I can do for you, please let me know.”

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