Anthony F.
Run and Managed By Monkeys
In the beginning I had a lot of good things to say about the Shopgoodwill site, but that was well over six years ago. Unfortunately, since then most of what I have to say is not good at all. The website itself is never updated. It is very unpredictable at best, suddenly stalling out, slowing down, or refusing to bring up a page. This poses big problems at the end of auctions when timing can be important. I cannot tell you how many items I missed out on because suddenly the site stalled out, the item ended, and thus could not enter a bid. Then there is the ridiculous laziness in how items are listed, presented, and information is provided. Some of the stores are pretty good with important information like measurements, decent enough photos, and fairly accurate information. However, most often there are no measurements at all, or very cruddy attempts at tossing in a ruler, or measuring tape at an item (literally) in the photo. Which the majority of the time is meaningless. Photos are spotty at best, with important features of many items either poorly shot, or not shown at all. Sometimes an item is packed in a cardboard box and cannot be seen at all... figure that one out. And then there is the supplied information, which most of the time is hardly anything at all, or not at all. Usually its just a boilerplate paragraph that has nothing at all to do with the item. Then there is the very often peculiar listings of valuable or tasty items that go up for auction but are "pick up only". Despite their being perfectly shipable. My take on this is that someone at that store wants the item, but it has to be put up on the auction site and thus figures if they make it pick up only, the chances are that no one will bid on it. Now if it were oversized, maybe I would understand. But explain to me how the same store can ship every other small lamp, or tea cup and saucer, or 8"x10" framed picture, and then randomly not for those very same items but happen to be antiques, vintage, or obviously sought after. Maybe I'm a bit too suspicious but... But then there is this one issue that leaves me flabbergasted. Should you need to change important shipping information in your account, say an address for instance. Don't expect it to take place immediately like every other modern site. I lost three items this way. I decided to have them shipped elsewhere When I made the changes in my account, only one I had started bidding on, the other two no. There was still five to six days left on the auctions. Yet, the shipping information was not updated instantly, in fact by the way things occurred, the shipping information didn't update for many days. And this despite taking extra precautions by sending messages to the stores informing them of the shipping location change just after changing it. Despite that, the items were shipping to the wrong location, and I never heard or saw them again. Only one made it, and only because I chased down the FedEx driver the day it was to be delivered. Despite contacting the stores, FedEx (which is no longer a customer oriented service anymore as of a year ago), the stores would not take responsibility for the loses. I was out a few hundred dollars on that. I pointed out to them that had it been eBay, or any other retailer online, account information changes are instantaneous. But for some reason, Goodwill doesn't seem to update their information for days. I could list many other terrible experiences I've had with this site the past three years, but I think this is enough.