Shane
Chess Set is beautiful, but customer service ruins the whole experience
The Chess Set I received was beautiful. I have no complaints about that. If that's all you care about, you might be happy buying from them. But my purchasing experience was bad enough that I wish I'd bought elsewhere, and I will never buy anything from them again. First of all, the website said I'd get it within 3-7 days. After 12 days, it hadn't even shipped yet. I reached out to customer service, who promised the world to me. They told me they'd refund me $30, and they'd ship it the next day express, so that I'd get it within 2 days. It didn't ship the next day. When I reached out again, they promised the next day. It didn't ship then, either. It took the better part of 3 weeks before I finally got the order, which isn't the end of the world, but I definitely wouldn't have bought from them if I knew their 3-7 day estimate was actually going to be more like 17+ days. I also never got the $30 refund from them that they promised. I reached out to them again, they basically admitted they never even tried to process it. They said they would. They didn't. On the third try, they said they'd send it over PayPal, which started to make me wonder if I was dealing with some kind of scam site, but they did in fact finally send the money, so I guess third time's the charm with them, but if you have to constantly hound a business to get them to keep their promises then I think we can agree they have terrible customer service, no matter how nicely they speak to you. They are always so nice, but their words are always empty. Their website also advertises a Free Handcrafted Chess Storage Box on all orders over $325. I never got it. They claimed it's because I took a 15% off coupon they had splattered all over their site, but the ad for the free box never said it couldn't be combined with other deals, and besides, my order with the discount was still well over $325. Customer Service promised they'd send it. They didn't. And they still have the same advertisement for the free storage box. This is just a lie. I contacted them again, and Customer Service once again said I don't get it because of that 15% discount, which means that the first person I talked to who said they'd send it literally never even tried to send it, he was just trying to shut me up and hoped I'd forget about it. As we'll come to find, that's what the next person did too. Then FedEx hits me with a huge customs fee. The problem is, the listing for the chess set never suggests it's going to be shipped from overseas. And if you dig deeper into their website, they say they cover all duties, fees, and local customs charges. So I contact Customer Service yet again, and they tell me that I need to cover it myself, and then they'll reimburse me. I think you can understand why I wouldn't trust them at all by this point, so I insisted that they pay it themselves, and to their credit they did, but they should have done it from the start, not making me get the bill and having to hound them for it. And that's sort of what's at the heart of all this. Customer Service is so polite and they promise you the world, and say everything they can to keep you happy in the moment, but for the most part they either have no intention of keeping their promises or they're so inept that they constantly forget. Either way it works out to the same thing: I had to contact them like half a dozen times for multiple issues with a single order, always talking to their AI before I could talk to a person, and no matter what customer service promised me, it would never be fulfilled unless I contacted them two more times. All the while they try to get me to write these reviews while I'm feeling like their platitudes amount to good customer service. Well it's been two weeks since I got them to write me an email confirmation that I'd definitely be receiving the free chess storage box, and I haven't heard a single word about it since, so at this point I assume I'll never see it, and I don't have it in me to contact them yet again. So my review is poor, and my advice is to stay away. EDIT on 10/15: I received the wooden box. I never received a tracking number for it, nor any real indication that it was actually coming aside from customer service telling me it would, and with my pretty poor experience with that I had completely written it off. That said, the box is beautiful, and I'm glad I received it. This puts me in an awkward spot as customer service has eventually managed to do everything they said they'd do, they just do it with basically zero communication, in an extremely slow and delayed manner, and usually requiring me to reach out to badger them to get anything done. Look, if you're willing to accept the headaches and extremely slow timelines, they make good chess sets and their work is beautiful. But the headaches are bad enough that I will not personally put myself through this again. The choice is yours.