Yugster.com is a site that follows a similar business model to Woot, but without the amazing writing staff. Josh writes that he’s made a few purchases from the site, and the last one resulted in an opened box that contained a broken product from a defunct manufacturer. The company ultimately gave him a refund, but left him on the hook for return shipping. This turned him off the site entirely.

Alright so I’m a fool for falling for one of the oldest tricks in the book and going for the “Yugster Surprise Bundle” for $17 and thinking I was going to end up with a Nissan GT-R in my driveway when I came home, but ending up with a couple of generic mp3 player cases and some other stupid sh*t. But that’s not what this is about.

I’ve ordered a few things from Yugster.com, each time it has taken them at least a day or longer than their advertised 2-5 day shipping as stated on their FAQ to actually get something in the mail.

My latest experience with them has once and for all taught me to not even bother going back to the place.

$27.97 + $6.00 shipping for an 8.4″ Smart Parts digital photo frame when the girlfriends mother had just said she’d love to get one of those and put all of the family photos on them!? It was a no brainer! I’ll take one, please. Thank you!

So the package finally comes in the mail. It’s quite obvious that the box had been opened previously. I take it out, plug it in and power it on. There’s no picture. I double-check everything. Still nada. Wait. What’s that. There is a picture but it’s so faint you can barely tell that it’s on. Not to worry, I’ll contact the manufacturer since there’s a warranty.

Hmmm. The phone number isn’t in service. Not to worry, there’s an e-mail address.

Errr….mailer daemon…undeliverable. Interesting. Google.com >> “smart parts technical support” … … …

Smart Parts is no longer in business, they’ve been bought by some other company. So I call the other company, they tell me to take it up with where I bought it from. So I go ahead and contact yugster about it.

I explain my dissatisfaction and that I can’t believe that I’m the one that’s going to end up paying for shipping twice (Totalling about $17) on something that was broken out of the box, nevermind the fact that the manufacturer of the product is no longer in business. Naturally they made sure not to make mention of that fact when they were selling the item.

While I did ultimately receive a refund for the product (again less the $17 for shipping and handling) it still seems shady as hell to me that I ended up eating the cost for a product that was broken out of the box, and it was probably known to be nonfunctional as it had apparently already been opened.

One could say that a more prudent person would’ve researched more indepth before making the purchase, and perhaps this is another case of “if it’s too good to be true”, but I’ll never be doing business with Yugster.com again.

Deal-loving Consumerist hive mind, have you shopped with Yugster? What was your experience?

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