What a pain in the bottom!

Recently, I had a customer who purchased two Wesco products from my Homeware Secrets business. She was an absolutely painful person.

What happened? – you may ask.

On 27 April 2017, Angela (name changed for privacy purposes) emailed indicating that there was a scratch on the lid of the orange Wesco Spaceboy XL 35L Waste Bin that she received that afternoon. She demanded for a lid replacement. As a business person, we do think about the customers, but also think about the cost it will be for us to send another one, especially if it was found to be a damage that was done by the customer. Customer may be right, but there are seriously some arseholes out there who will take advantage of the system.

What we would normally do is to get the lid back to ascertain if the damage was done by the customer or by the warehouse, or by the shipping company. We needed more information. So we asked for further pictures rather than just the scratch on the lid. She sent a few more pictures and continued to demand for a new lid. I was stuck in the middle in this case as that item was a ‘dropship item’ due to lack of storage space at my end. She insisted that she wants a replacement without sending the item back. She was so rude about it and even said she only wants the replacement lid, not a Pen Pal.

She just decided that she would threaten me and exercise authority by lodging a dispute and claim through PayPal, thinking that she would get a refund without returning the item, which cost a few hundred dollars. She also purchased another Wesco item in the same order but she decided to claim the entire amount, when the other item was fine. Luckily the warehouse was in the same state as she is and it was easy to organise for a sales representative to go over to exchange the lid with her. That way, she was not able to claim that the lid was damaged again through shipping of the replacement.

Cutting the long story short, even after getting the new lid, she decided that she would be nasty and refuse to do anything about the PayPal claim. She was supposed to close it, but she didn’t bother. She left it open. PayPal held the money and was not able to release it until they get instructions from Angela to close the claim. They sent her an email. I sent her an email. I even called her to make sure everything is okay, and she hung up the phone on me as soon as she knew where I was from. She refused my phone calls on her mobile too.

It was lucky that PayPal needed her to provide a tracking number for the return of the goods in order to refund the money to her. I knew that she wouldn’t lift a finger to do that, as it will cost her a lot to ship the items back. I also knew that what she was doing is just to prolong the money held in PayPal because she can.

I was lucky that I was not in need of the money, so I let the deadline of 10 days to pass before the money was released. It got released today.

This is one of the customers that really think she is everything, and everyone owes her everything. I did call her workplace as she left her company name for delivery purposes, and because she didn’t pick up my phone calls, and I needed to speak with her. She was not impressed that I was resourceful, as I found out that she was a receptionist at her workplace. I feel that it’s because she was at the bottom of the food chain there at her work, she can only exercise authority and power to retailers like us just to feel good. It really irritated me.

One thing that I will give her though… she has good taste in homewares! 🙂