I order 6 cartons and all was perfect. They send 3 packages (2 cartons in each) and I receive them fast and the 3 in the same week.
The taste is good and I'm happy with my order.
The only thing I didn't like too much was that the price of my bank charge me was 9-10€ more expensive. I saw in the terms of use that my bank or my credit card company can charge me 1%-8% fee (was 8% in this case). They didn't charge me any fee and it's not really clear for me who charge that fee. But it still ok, cheaper than my country. I will order again.
Response from DutyfreedepotMar 9, 2017
Hey Caco,
I'm glad to hear you received your order quickly without issue.
As for the bank charge, as we charge from overseas some people may incur an international transaction fee due to currency exchange when using a credit card as payment.
This fee is taken by banks, credit card companies, and payment processing companies due to the currency exchange.
In any case, thank you for ordering with us here at DFD and thank you for your great feedback!
From,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
TS
Tim S.
Total BS
I was charged about $50 more than I agreed to after all of the extra charges that showed up on my credit card. The order never arrived and after multiple attempts I never got any answers. Do not trust these people who are slowly stealing from their customers and it is sad that most google results for online cigarettes direct consumers to this untrustworthy site. Shame on you people.
Response from DutyfreedepotMar 9, 2017
Tim,
I'm sorry to hear you have not received your order and that you claim to have been overcharged.
I have checked our system and cannot see you have sent us any email regarding an overcharge or missing order, nor have we received any document from you showing the overcharge. If you sent us an email, used our contact us page, or called in, you would have and will get immediate assistance regarding your order issues.
Now I can see the order you placed on 2/4/17 has not been received and we are nearing the end of our shipping time frame.
The tracking does not look good here so we can have your order re-sent and get it to you as fast as possible or, we can issue a refund here.
Regarding the overcharge, please note you paid using a credit card. We clearly state in our terms of use that you may incur an international transaction fee due to currency exchange of up to 8% of the order total as we charge from overseas. If you received a fee of over 8%, please send us a copy of your credit card statement showing our charge for your order (you can white out any and all irrelevant information as we only need to see our charge). If you were overcharged, we will work with you to resolve this issue. Note as a US customer, you can pay with an Electronic Check to avoid said fees.
We will be in touch with you later on today to help you resolve your order issues.
Rest assured at the end of the day you will either receive your order or your money back, that is a DFD guarantee.
Thank you for your feedback.
From,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
Hey Tim,
I tried to call all three numbers you have listed multiple times with no luck and I have sent you an email a few days ago with no response from you.
As I can see you have not received your order and we have now passed the shipping time frame and you are not responding, I will have your order refunded in full (which should include any sort of fee's you may have incurred as we will simply reverse the original transaction).
You will get an email once your refund has been processed.
Best regards,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
SH
Steven H.
Excellent
They did exactly what they said they would, I will be back. Thank you, Steve
Response from DutyfreedepotFeb 21, 2017
Hey Steven,
Thank you for your great feedback!
Best regards,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
I have used this company for a couple of years, and they started out reliable with good customer service. Now however, they have become so unreliable, and with such terrible customer service that they have sunk to the level of scammers. Over the past year, I have had a few orders that had trouble getting through customs and delivered to me, but customer service always rectified the issue in the end and I eventually got my order. On my last order though, everything changed.
I placed an order for 25 cartons back in August of 2016. As of February 9th, 2017, I have only received 11/25 cartons. I have made numerous contacts asking for this to be corrected, both through their website complaint system and through calls to their customer service number. It has been 6 months, and I STILL have not received the missing cartons (most of which were returned to sender per tracking info).
In my last contact with customer service, I requested a refund, since they had repeatedly failed to send me the cartons I had paid for and not received. The customer service agent didn't apologize for this problem or express any sympathy, but instead told me that if I ask for a refund he would have to close my account and I wouldn't be able to order from them again. It has been over a month since that call and I STILL have neither received a refund nor the cartons I paid for. I tried calling customer service again today and it simply rang and rang with no one answering.
DO NOT ORDER FROM THIS COMPANY. You may or may not get what you pay for, and if you don't, their customer service will not help you.
Update:
Thanks for your reply. Just to clarify a few points. I made 2 separate complaints through the website complaint system. Each time an answer was made, the complaints were immediately "closed" and there was no way to reply to them, although I tried. The December complaint was my second, the first was in November. I am unable to tell you the exact dates since my account is now locked. Prior to that I had tried to contact the agent I usually dealt with via email, Simon, but received no response. So this has been one very long experience where I have had to constantly escalate my actions to receive a response. I will update here if/when I can confirm that this issue gets resolved.
Update #2:
I am seeing a refund pending to my account today. Thank you for resolving that promptly. I have increased my rating by one star for that, but I should not have needed to make so many contacts before getting a response.
Response from DutyfreedepotFeb 14, 2017
Tracy,
I'm sorry to hear about your order problem and sorry to see you feel the way you do after working with our company for over 2 years.
After looking at your order, I understand your frustration.
I can see you first contacted us about missing items from your last order on 12/2/16 using our contact us system in which we replied to you on 12/4/16 offering you a reshipment for the missing items from your order. Note you did not reply to our offer so at point, no action was taken on your order.
You then called in and spoke to one of our reps. on 1/5/17 requesting a refund for the items you were missing.
As for what was said on the phone, I will check the recording of your phone conversation with our rep. to hear what was said by both parties and I will take disciplinary action if one of our reps. did not provide the kind of good, personal, and helpful service our customers have come to expect and the kind of professional service I demand.
Now, I can see there has been a huge delay in the processing of your refund which is inexcusable and I will personally see to it that your refund is issued immediately. Once issued you will get an email confirmation.
I will see how this order fell through the cracks as I can see some things that should not have happened and some problems which need to be fixed. I will take action to ensure we close up these cracks to avoid this in the future.
Just know we will always do what ever it takes to ensure orders are received quickly and as trouble free as possible. If your order fails to arrive (like yours), you will always be covered with DFD.
Thank you for your feedback. We need to hear about these kinds of bad cases to locate problems we may not know we have and implement solutions so we can prevent these issues from happening again.
Thank you again for your feedback. We need to hear all kinds of feedback whether it's good, or bad as in your case.
Best regards,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
.
Hey Tracy,
If you sent us two complaints and they were immediately closed, something must have gone wrong. I will have our programmers look in to this and fix the problem if they locate one.
As for Simon, he is no longer working with our company. I will look to see why you did not get a reply letting you know he no longer worked here as it should have been an automatic reply.
Looks like the stars aligned (but for a bad reason) and things just went wrong on this order, unfortunately when it rains it pours.
I already have started my review of your case and will continue until I am satisfied solutions are implemented to fill in the "cracks" .
In any case, I can see the refund was sent to you just the other day so you should see it in the next day or two as a credit on your statement.
Thank you for your feedback and sorry about your terrible experience regarding this order.
We will always try to do better.
.
Best regards,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
JS
Jeffrey S.
Order took a while, but all is well
I received only part of the order initially. I contacted DFD and they responded quickly, sent out the part of the order that went missing. Once again, not complete . DFD responded by resending the missing portion, and finally received the complete order. VERY reliable, highly recommend this company!! Good people!!!
Response from DutyfreedepotFeb 7, 2017
Hey Jeffrey,
Thank you for your great feedback!
Best regards,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
MO
Moir
Item did eventually arrive.
The company does state that it can take months for items to arrive.
I ordered 6 cartons first off and after some 7 weeks - nothing had arrived. I received a letter from customs to say that they had been seized.
I contacted Duty Free depot who sent 3 cartons of a different brand (twice as expensive) These cartons arrived without incident.
I have now placed another order for 3 cartons. Hopefully they will arrive!
Thanks duty free depot
Response from DutyfreedepotFeb 7, 2017
Hey Moir,
I am glade to hear you finally received your order and received assistance when you needed it.
When something goes wrong, let us know and we will do everything we can to resolve the problem as best and as quickly as possible.
Thank you for your feedback!
Best regards,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
PN
Peter N.
AVOID AT ALL COST!!!
I placed an order in late November. When I asked why it still hadn't processed by mid December, I was told they were unable to process Visa at the time, but they could now, and it would be reprocessed that night. When it still didn't go through, I was told that my bank declined the transaction. My bank shows absolutely no record of the failed attempt. After confirming they had the right card info and that I had the right info to tell my bank to pre-approve, the same thing happened. I was again told that my bank declined the transaction, even though my bank already had a noted allowance for it, and again my bank showed no record. I took the bait and agreed to pay with an e-check, since it's now late January, and the person the hard-to-find bottle of liquor was for has now passed Christmas, New Years, and a birthday. Well, the e-check never attempted either, and these people have my card and account info from the check, but I don't even have answers. After specifically looking reviews of them up on Google, I found even worse experiences than mine. This is the only site that the company looks remotely good on, and even the few bad reviews here made me back out. I changed cards and account numbers for security. Anyone else should do the same. STAY AWAY!!!
Since this initial review and DFD's reply, I had added a response below. Within a short time, they requested my review be taken down. In response to this, I have willingly provided the administrators of this site with my proof of dealings with DFD, and have even modified my review to the point of no longer even having what was actually a rather polite reply, with actual suggestions on ways they could better themselves. Meanwhile, the only response from DFD on their own site has been an automated request that I also provide to them a copy of my bank statement. BEWARE!!!
Since my review's removal, and while continuing to edit it to fall within 'guidelines', I had made another attempt to inquire about the automated reply asking for a bank statement via DFD's site. Now in early February, I get an automated email that my order has supposedly been processed. I also got a second automated email with the expected payment declined response, but also saying that they have already shipped my order, so now I really owe them. Suspiciously, the company that the automated email said the order was billed from was nowhere near the same name as the one the live representative told me the were using months ago. Also suspiciously, there was no tracking number to verify any of this, and my bank still shows no attempt against the closed accounts. When I log back into their website, my home panel is blocked by an automated payment demand. This takes away any ability for me to access order information, including tracking. It also now takes away my ability to use the messaging system to even deal with them.
A review this bad, even written politely, had to be confirmed, argued, and edited to even stay up. You can only imagine what myself and others really wanted to say. I'm done being polite. I will be one of the few that will continue to do what I need to keep this bad of a review about your company up to warn others. This company will put more energy into fighting bad reviews, than actually handling their customers properly on their site. Again STAY AWAY!!!
Response from DutyfreedepotFeb 14, 2017
Hey Peter Novak,
I have tried to find your order / account with us but I cannot find it under the name you have provided.
Please let me know your order number or the name you ordered under so I can see what exactly happened.
I can tell you that we have been around for over 10 years not by scamming people but, by providing top quality products for bargain prices and providing a high level of support to ensure orders are received as quickly and trouble free as possible.
Now, the claims you are making here about scamming, fraudulent charges and, counterfeits are simply false and without merit.
Just let me know the order number or the name that you ordered under and I will see what exactly occurred and help you with your order payment issue.
Best regards,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
Peter,
As I still cannot locate your account and you have not provided any order number or useful bit of information for me to locate your account, I will simply respond to your claims as best as I can.
Now, we did have a problem processing credit card payments towards the end of last year.
Note this problem effected many of our customers who wanted to order using their credit card.
We had our staff contact our customers one by one informing them of this issue and asking customer if they wanted to pay with a different mode of payment so we could get their order going while we still tried to fix the credit card payment issue. Note we added warnings on our site when selecting credit card as payment informing people of this issue and did what we could to resolve the problem as fast as possible. The issue has been resolved for those who are interested.
We reported your review as you did not provide any order number or the actual name you ordered under and refused to do so, so we could not confirm anything you have written here but some of it like the issue processing credit card payments was correct. By your refusal to simply let us know who you are, you forced our hand to report your review.
You wrote and have written all sorts of things that are / were so far out there, it was simply impossible to respond to all of your absurd claims. Not to mention we may have a different definition for the word polite as your review was far from it and your subsequent updates (which are not shown here) were vindictive and slanderous (which is putting it lightly).
Instead of working with us and trying to help us as a company help you as a customer, you simply attacked us and were not looking to have your problem resolved nor have a fair and honest conversation about what happened. You lectured us about all sorts of things instead of simply letting us know who you are and what happened so we can take a look in to it and fix any problems we could locate and assist you as best we could to complete your order.
In a nutshell, we are not a perfect company, far from it and we are aware of this. This is why we are constantly working to improve our service and pour time, money, and energy in to improving our service.
We have been online for over 10 years by providing great service and prices, not by trying to scam or steal. We will always respond to any problem and are as upfront as possible and try to resolve the problem as quickly and fairly as possible. We want to hear about problems and bad experiences so we can figure out what went wrong and fix the problem and hopefully, create a better smoother shopping experience from placing an order to delivery. Honest and fair bad reviews are worth more to us as a company then good reviews (though we greatly appreciate them) as they show us that there is always room for improvement, and sometimes they help us find problems we did not know we had as a company which in turn leads to the problem being fixed which improves our service.
In any case, I can see no matter what kind of response you get, you will continue to claim all sorts of falsehoods and conspiracy theories and write "STAY AWAY!!!" and "BEWARE!!!" as if there is real danger. The only danger is that you may save a lot of money and you may get quality products for bargain prices with pretty good service so BEWARE!!! and be prepared to save.
From,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
TD
Theo de V.
Dutyfreedepot is EXCELLENT--a model for all online sellers!
Dutyfreedepot is a great online seller that I would highly recommend. They always ship quickly and their prices are excellent! Even if i don't see a specific special for what I'm ordering, specials almost always have popped up when i go to check out. I saw some grumbles in other reviews about orders not showing up and occasionally this does happen but by using the tracking numbers that come with every order, it ALWAYS shows that the packages were sent in a prompt manner. We have been ordering from DFD for over nine years, and sometimes packages do seem to vanish en route after entering the USA. When this does happen, the tracking always cease at the same USPS blackhole [US Custom].
But whenever this does happen, we notify Dutyfreedepot and they quickly send out a replacement every single time. I have not lost a single cent from ordering from them in almost ten years. They ask you to promise to pay just in case the package should arrive at a later date. This actually happened twice and both times the replacements arrived before the original shipments! But even here DFD has been great, after we notified them of the original package have arrived they sent us new invoices for the 'extras', but both times they only charged for the items themselves and and we saved more money on the Free Shipping.
They also have a rebate/credits that come on every order which can be used to save even more on next orders. The only possible room for improvement is when they're out of certain items (Van Nelle Zware Shag) if they could maybe put a 'Notification by Email' button on the product's webpage whereupon you get an email when the item is back in stock. As it is now, they take the page offline so you have to just continually check their site to see when it is back in stock. Otherwise, I wish that ALL online retailers were as committed to Customer Service as the good, honest and caring folks at DFD.
Theo de Vries
Response from DutyfreedepotJan 30, 2017
Hey Theo,
I thank you for your honest feedback and for your suggestion.
I will look in to creating a "Notification" system you have suggested as it is a great idea and will make the ordering process more user friendly.
I thank you again.
Best regards,
Daniel
Customer Support Manager
