Hector ordered one product from Hobbytron and received something else. He tried to contact them to arrange a return, but every avenue they offered didn’t work, or funneled him to an alternative method. He finally recieved an RMA from them, but no instructions or description of what happens next. Hobbytron is really busy right now, Hector! They don’t need your guff!

So I buy a couple airsoft M16’s to use as movie props from Hobbytron. All fine and good. I receive the package and get some other completely ridiculous alien zapper looking things. I figure, no problem, how hard should it be to fix this?

Here’s what ensues:

1) I go to their customer service site and see that they offer Livehelp (although it’s been offline at every point of the day I’ve checked since then)

2) I decide to shoot them an email and figure out what’s up. They have a form setup for emailing, with a COMPLETELY UNUSABLE textbox. After you fill in the personal information and hit ‘next step’ to describe your problem. The box fills in with ‘please call us at xxx phone number’ and doesnt let you add anything else.

3) I wait until the next day and call during the day. Ok, now I’ll get somewhere. I talk to the lady for 3 or 4 minutes to which she directs me to their ‘policies’ page with a curious little ‘order fullfilment policy’. It explains that they reserve the right to send items of equivelent function to fullfill the order if what I request is not available. I tell the lady does that mean they can send me a gatorade when I buy coke. She gets confused. She tells me to go through the website because she is not allowed to deal with any actual account stuff as she’s some outsourced nonsense. Atleast I get an email address out of her.

4) I send an email. They respond two days later literally with an RMA number. No information as to whats going on, what will be refunded or the obvious fact that I’m gonna have to comp the shipping charges. Furious, I instantly hit the reply button. Wait…it’s greyed out. How peculiar, they’ve managed to send me an email with no ‘from’ adress.

I think if they put as much effort into selling what they sell instead of devising clever ways to avoid their customers, they wouldn’t have customers making sites like this.

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