Shoebacca, We Have No Future Together.

In case you haven't heard, I had quite the ordeal with the online shoe company Shoebacca.com.  If you want to get yourself caught up on this exhilarating story, you'll need to read this post, this post, and this post.  Well, big surprise, the saga continued a couple of weeks ago...

To quickly get you caught up, Shoebacca.com wanted me to give them another chance to get it right, so they gave me a $50 coupon.  Since I'm such a generous, and loving husband, I thought my wife could use this $50 to get some new stylin' kicks for herself.  Putting up with all of my training, I'd say I owe it to her...

So a couple of weeks ago, she went a surfin' on shoebacca.com to see what they had, and what she could get.  She ended up deciding to get a pair of shoes for work, and a pair of shoes for play.  While going through the check-out process, a window kept popping up asking for the credit card holder's date of birth.  I've ordered from shoebacca.com before, and never had that happen.  It could just be a new security measure that credit card companies are taking, but at the time we didn't feel comfortable sending that info over the highly secure internet.

Since I have such a great history with customer service over in shoebacca-land, I decided that I would just give them a call and place my order the good ol' fashioned way...sort of.  I was greeted by a very nice woman who was able to place my order with no problems, until she read me the total for my purchase.  I still had the shopping cart open online (which we had created the night before), and the total online was half of what she quoted me.  I immediately questioned the discrepancy.

Here's a screen shot of my order cart

Taken from my packing slip.  This doesn't shoe my $50 discount, but the total is what matters...more than double my shopping cart!

Well, my wonderful customer service agent was unsure of why there was a discrepancy.  Since I had the computer open, I went ahead and did a new search for the same shoes, and surprise, surprise, they came up at the more expensive price.  I asked if there was any way that the shoe prices went up over night.  She checked with her manager and was told that the price of these shoes has not changed recently.  I laughed and said, "Well, obviously there's no way I can show this to you, so I guess..." and I was interrupted, for good reason though.  I was fully prepared to just go ahead and pay the new price of the shoes, because that was the now advertised price, and these prices that I had in my shopping cart were from last night.  My customer service specialist said that if I could do a "print screen" and email it to her, she would look into granting me a refund for the difference!  Now where was that customer service when I was going through my order last month!?

So in a matter of minutes, I made a copy of the page and sent it through the magical world of the internet over to shoebacca.com.  I received a reply in another couple of minutes letting me know that she was going to review the page I had sent her, and would be getting back to me. 

About a week later, the shoes arrived and I still hadn't heard back from my new friend at shoebacca.com.  I decided to take matters into my own hands, and fired off an email, just asking what the status was on the possible refund.  The reply I received wasn't quite what I was expecting, given the tone of our initial phone conversation.  In the email, she said,

"I submitted the information over to be reviewed for a possible refund. It was denied. But I am trying to get you a  awesome coupon to use  on any future purchases with SHOEBACCA. So just bare with me and once I hear something back I will email you."

I received that email ten days ago, and haven't heard anything back.  This causes me to ask a few questions.  First, based on my history with Shoebacca, do they just deny every refund/price match?  I'm 0-2.  Second, how can the change in price be explained?  Third, is Shoebacca's solution to every problem to just send a coupon?  And lastly, why is everything so slow at Shoebacca?  I can understand that my order is no big deal, and therefor not a huge priority.  But why is it that I have to keep contacting them to get things done?

I can't really complain too much about this order.  I have no way to argue that I should have been given the cheaper price, other than sending them a screen shot (which I suppose they can assume that I altered somehow; trust me, I'm not that smart.).  I could have sent the shoes back and just ordered some other ones, but I was pretty curious to see how this would play out.  As for the customer service?  Well, it was better initially.  This time she at least offered up a solution, even though it ended up not mattering.  Overall, I still give it a 2 out of 5, maybe a 3 at the most.

In conclusion, I don't think I will be using Shoebacca.com again.  Not only have I had problems with my two most recent orders, but the customer service just wasn't up to par.  It gets pretty old having to do their job for them and solve whatever problem there is.  Plus, the shoes I've been getting lately were cheaper on other websites anyway (I had pre-paid coupons at Shoebacca which was forcing me to shop there).  If you've used them before and had success, consider yourself lucky.  If you've never used them, I recommend you stay that way and just shop somewhere else.