I have called unicycle.com’s phone number 4 days in a row now at 2 different times and they have not answered their phones. I also have emailed them and havent gotten a single reply. Are they just on vacation or something???
They dont usually answer but if you leave a message they seem to get back to you. The emails do take along time to reply. I heard they have caller id so if you kepp calling i bet they will pick up. BUt today is sunday so I dont know if they are open today?
-Brian
They always answer when I call. Maybe they have caller ID.
Seriously though. Call them and if they don’t answer, call back in 10 minutes. Repeat. If you’re having really bad luck, email them or leave a message. But I have been really upset with their customer service recently. It has been really poor. Try Bedford.
Iv’e called and left 2 messages. Both of them were polite, but the little kids voice on the answering machine is quite annoying. I wish the guy from the unicycle.com ad in Universe2 would do the answering machine so I dont have to hear: little kid voice Hi! You have weached de copowate officos of unercycer dot coom, pwease weave a message and weew caw you back. For those who don’t understand any of it: Hi! You have reached the corporate offices of unicycle dot com. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back.
Did you hear about the great pissing off of Kevin by unicycle.com?
Did you hear about the great pissing off of [b]everyone[/b] by unicycle.com?
Anyway, no, please tell your story.
I’ll attach the angry email I sent them, as it is much easier.
To whom it may concern,
I am writing to express my displeasure about a recent “transaction” I had with unicycle.com. I ordered an item (Kinport rail adapter) online. The item was not listed as out of stock. The next day I called to ensure that the item was in stock and ask who my money order needed to be made out to. I was told it was in stock.
I received a call earlier today informing me that the item was, in fact, out of stock indefinately. I was offered no substitute. My only option was to have my money sent back to me. I am not satisfied by this.
Because of your mistake (the incorrect information I was given) I am without my money for 2 weeks. I will have my item, from a competitor, almost 3 weeks after I needed it. I have to go through the trouble and expense of cashing your check and purchasing a new money order. Pehaps most importantly to you, you have lost a valuable customer.
“We take great pride in the high level of customer service we provide. We’ll be happy to help you!”
Prove it. I was offered no sort of reparation. Your website still has the item listed as out of stock. I learned, from one of your employees, that it has been out of stock for over a month. Your customer service, which used to be commendable, has become quite poor. I am certain a number of your customers have gone to your competition for this reason.
I have been a loyal customer for over 2 years. I do not want to start buying things from Darren Bedford, but incidents like this tempt me. Improve your service or I will have to take my business to your competitors.
Kevin O’Brien
daaaang, that sucks. Someone I know ordered a Coker from unicycledotcom, and they recieved a 16 inch unicycle and a 20 inch unicycle. HAH
And when I ordered a Coker, it came tacoed.
I’ve had several other mishaps with unicycledotcom, but for some reason I keep ordering from them. Stupid store.
Yeah I saw that on your page. Mine isn’t nearly as bad, but it pissed me off because they told me it was in stock. I even went out of my way to make sure it was. And they told me it was. Which means they suck. And now I have to lose money filling another money order. So basically because of them I get something they advertised as having like 2 weeks later for an extra couple bucks. Bastards.
Their sucking isn’t always a bad thing. A friend of mine recently got $120 worth of stuff possibly free from them. He ordered some stuff from them COD. But when the UPS guy delivered he didn’t get the money order. So either it’s free or they’ll send him a bill. They might not be able to for legal reasons. I’m not sure. But it just goes to show how screwed up they are.
I too am very tempted to order some of my things through bedford. If they had a neato site like UDC does I would definetely order from them. But somehow just the fact that all I get to see of my product before it comes is a title in all caps and a canadian price, somehow, keeps me at UDC…
Oh man…
Don’t even bother browsing Darren’s website. It’s so out of date. He has so much more stuff than that. And at different prices too. A lot of his stuff is cheaper than UDC, and the shipping is the same. The service is a lot better. If you know what you want, ordering it from Darren is the way to go. If you don’t know, emailing him with your question is. He’s really helpful and usually gets back to you within a day. Trust me, try him. But yeah, he could definately make sooooo much more money if he had a website like UDC and kept it up to date (unlike UDC)
Heh. My thomson post just arrived, but I won’t be able to use it for another week and a half. Thanks unicycle.com!
Also, where the hell is my money? What if I was poor and sent you all of my money? It doesn’t take this long to send mail from GA to PA, losers.
kind of offtopic but
why the hell doesnt uni.com check their KH hubs for defects before they send them out to customers? my hub was janky, so i had to send it back to them so they could fix it! so i dont have a uni right now. 
Bedford is the way to go!
Doesn’t that add up to 36"? What’s the problem? 
Okay. The 20"/16" thing is a definite order screw-up. Which I’m sure they rectified, at a great cost (to them) in shipping and additional labor.
Do you think Uni.com sent you a tacoed Coker? Really? Though it’s possible, I highly doubt it. This is why UPS or other shipping companies insure what they ship. The larger the object, the greater chance that things can bash into it on its way from Marietta to you. For UPS (and airlines) the most common location for package damage is in their automated conveyor systems.
Obie. I’m still trying to figure out what it was you wanted Uni.com to do. Other than not making the mistake of course. You were told a part was in stock when in fact it wasn’t. This is very common for companies selling merchandise from warehouses. Their packing system is manual, so there is always going to be a gap between product getting shipped and inventories getting updated. It is possible that the last rail adapter went out the door after you ordered yours.
Or maybe the inventory numbers were just out of date. It happens surprisingly a lot with companies that sell things online or through the mail. I see it all the time as a bait-and-switch technique used by discount online sellers of camera and electronics equipment. Buyer beware.
No, Uni.com is not trying to scam you out of your $23.00 plus shipping. What do you want from them? It was a mistake. At the kind of margins the cycling industry runs at, you can’t afford to make financial reparations if you make mistakes on $23 items. Hopefully your big-picture reputation will carry you through when these small mishaps happen.
Unicycle.com is known for having periods of many shipping errors, especially around the holidays (and) when they have to hire new/inexperienced staff. But their overall customer service is so many times better than most mail order companies, I do not find it such a big problem.
Get over yourself. Sure it’s annoying. But if being out $23 (plus shipping) keeps you from eating, or otherwise makes it impossible to order a replacement until you get the check back, most of the problem is on your end. If you had a credit card it would be much easier.
Don’t get me wrong, Being poor is not a crime. I used to be poor too. Lucky for me, back then there were very few parts you could order. The ones you could get had to be ordered by phone, with a long distance phone call that you would have to pay for. if they were in stock.
It is not good when you see from the outside bad service. I will make sure that John and Amy know about your comments. I know how much these comments will be hurting them, they really do care about customer service.
Although it is not an excuse, it is prossibly worth you realising that Unicycle.com in the US recently lost 2 of its long term employees and have had to replace and train their replacements. This of course takes time and will slow things up. This has happened at the same time as they are rebuilding every KH hub that they have in their warehouse and it is worth pointing out that they have more in their warehouse than everyone else in the whole world put together!
Roger
I had the pleasure of visiting UDC a month ago. John and Amy took the time to show me around, even though they were busy. Prior to stopping by I had tried to call several times before leaving a message, they did call back. It was just the two of them up front and one of their guys building a refurbished Coker in the back and another guy going through all the new KH boxes to be sure all the parts were there. At one point John D. retrieved a load of phone messages. It takes time to call people back.
I had an experience with Bedford where it seemed to take forever to get back to me. Turns out he was in the states for a bit. Didn’t stop me from ordering my 29er frame from him.
I’ve bought from UDC and Bedford, both with good service. They may not always answer their phones and sometimes e-mail doesn’t reply as quickly as you like but I think they are both quality vendors.
Unicycle.com response
I don’t normally respond to criticisms on this newsgroup because I’ve always wanted to know what others are really thinking. If I were to continually post on the newsgroup, some might not feel as free to ‘speak’ their mind. When someone offers constructive criticism, we do listen. “They suck” is not constructive.
The voices on our voicemail message belong to our children. Look at our logo. We cater to children, and we’re not planning to change that. Get over it.
We receive more than 100 email messages per day at our Help Desk. That’s a full-time job in itself, but the margins and the volumes don’t support hiring another full-timer. So we answer as quickly as we can. We’ve created an FAQ section, hoping people will refer to it, but we can tell from the questions we receive that the FAQ has been ignored. So we answer the questions anyway.
We have two full-timers (Amy and me), and four part-timers on staff. Three are college students. At any given time, four of us are available to answer the phone. If we’re all on the phone, or waiting on a customer in our showroom, we will not answer another call until we finish helping the person we’re speaking to. Many of you have visited our showroom in Atlanta. It’s like a unicyclist’s playground, so it’s not uncommon to spend a couple of hours with a customer. We’re not going to shoo them away so we can answer calls more quickly. Leave a message and we’ll call back as quickly as possible.
Kevin, you posted your letter to us, but you didn’t post my reply to you. As I wrote to you, customers often select ‘pay by check or money order’ but they never send the check. If we were to pull each of those items off the shelf and wait for the check, we’d need a separate warehouse for those items. The item you ordered was in stock at the time you ordered it, but was sold out before your check arrived. We reordered that item from our supplier several weeks ago, but the order has not yet arrived. We cannot force our supplier’s hand. We offered to return the check to you, or keep it and send the item when it was back in stock. Those are the only options available to us. What sort of reparations are you expecting?
The newest batch of Kris Holm unicycles was supposed to have corrected hubs. We spot-checked a few and they were fine, so we began shipping. About 6 have now been returned to us, and we have temporarily stopped shipments on all KH cycles until we can take every hub apart and apply the corrective steps, then test them. We’re shipping cycles again, as they’re ready.
Our store hours are 10:00 a.m. through 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. We’re here until 6:00 p.m., but we reserve the last two hours of each day as “all hands” join us at the loading dock and finish preparing orders for shipment. Our UPS driver arrives between 5:00 and 6:00; if we have temporarily stopped answering the phone, it’s because we’re working on getting your orders out. Our driver won’t wait.
Lastly, please know that we are sincerely grateful for all suggestions. We have made some embarassing mistakes. We will do our best not to repeat them. Many of your constructive suggestions have led to better products and process improvements. Unicycle.com isn’t some big, insensitive corporation. It’s Amy, Robbie, Moe, Ryan, Scott and me. We all understand the need to vent, and this is a great forum for that. If you want results, though, please direct your constructive criticism and suggestions to us.
We are grateful to John Foss and Roger Davies for answering your concerns on our behalf, and for making us aware of this public thrashing.
Best regards,
John Drummond
1-800-Unicycle
Yeah. I know what you are saying. I guess I kindof went off because I have this sexy thomson seatpost just sitting here. Here comes the part where I justify myself though.
My feeling on this is that it was a mistake that could have been very easily corrected. When Amy called me to tell me that it was out of stock (she was very nice BTW), she told me that it had been out of stock for over a month, and that they weren’t sure when they would be getting it in. Now it is obvious that they knew they were out of stock. So I just feel that they should have updated the site.
I know they are not trying to scam me. Unfortunately I don’t know what could have been done in this instance. The only comparable product they sell costs 3 times as much, and I don’t think they would consider offering that as a substitute. So the only thing they can do, I suppose is what they did. It just seems unfair in some situations, which I will get to below.
No, it’s not keeping me from ordering the part elsewhere, but if it was how could you hold me accountable? If someone advertises that they have something and they don’t, they are at fault. The buyer cannot anticipate this and may at times not have the money to pay for a product twice. I suppose it would be easier if I had a credit card in this instance, but it is a choice I have made. They accept money orders, so they should find a better way to deal with them in the case of an error.
This is the part where my ego and pride step in and say “I’m not poor”
Re: Unicycle.com response
Actually, that is not purposeful. When did you reply? I never got a return email from you. Check to make sure you typed my name out correctly.