my relationship with free It couldn’t have started worse: I bought for the first time in 2018, they canceled my order two weeks after I bought it and they showed no signs of life. But… UPDATED STORY!
Tuimeilibre.com: nightmare on Black Friday 2018
Like so many, I had made my shopping list to do last Black Friday. One of them, and no lessit was to renew my mobile to launch myself at last to the iPhone XS. You can imagine that we are not talking about a light investment. On November 25 I set to work. I am not what is called “foreign” to the world of ecommerce ;), so I was interested until I saw how the main ones moved players. I checked the official Apple store, El Corte Inglés, Fnac; I went through Amazon and checked Google Shopping.
I assumed that Apple would not be the option for price. Not surprisingly, there weren’t the lowest prices on Amazon either (this happens way more often than people realize). The best offer was in Tuimeilibre.com, an ecommerce that I did not know anything about.
But hey, I’m not used to being scared. I checked his online reputation and I already saw that he had “lights and shadows”. Threads as many people who complained that as others who did claim to have had good offers and .
The Web? A book Prestashop, without frills but correct and with points a priori reassuring: a mobile phone and clarity in customer service hours, the explicit physical address, in the center of A Coruña, a high score in its customer opinion service (9.4 out of 10). So I launched. They took the jackpot from my Black Friday purchase.
Waiting for my Tuimeilibre purchase: automatic, but fine
Everything that should have happened by the standards of a decent online store, happened:
- Registration email in your store
- Accepted payment email, with order reference number
- Confirmation of the order, with details of the purchase and the option to track the shipment. They didn’t have any big eCommerce frills (let’s not even talk) but I didn’t need it.
- Two days later, on November 27, preparation email in progress.
- A week later, on December 4, product email sent. Good!
Given what’s happened, it’s probably all automated, whether it actually happens or not.
It was taking longer than they said on their website, but honestly, I took it for granted that this would happen, it is common after Black Friday. Still, Tuimeilibre proactively sent an email on December 7 apologizing for the delay, blaming their logistics provider. (that was not so elegant anymore hehehe) and offering a wireless charging dock and a coupon for future purchases.
At that moment I thought «Well, if they are even going to be trustworthy, in the end». But…
Your Free Imei canceled the order
Until suddenly, on Sunday, December 9, just 2 weeks after the purchase, I suppose not coincidentally, an email arrived from “order cancelled”. So, without more.
After collecting, processing, supposedly send it… they send it on a Sunday night that the order is cancelled, without explaining anything about it. I was checked. But innocently I thought: «Monday I talk to them: maybe there was a problem with the payment or who knows».
And on Monday I discovered that Tuimeilibre does not exist, they are the parents.
- They officially have a phone for . I wrote to them and no response, not even marked as having arrived.
- I called the phone number on the website, several times at various different times and always get the same loud message that “You are calling outside of our business hours”. Although he was obviously calling on what was supposed to be his schedule.
- I mentioned them and wrote on Twitter: zero response.
- I replied to their cancellation email: no response.
Conclusions of my beginnings with Tuimeilibre
When I first published the article, I had paid for an Iphone XS which neither had nor expected to have. At least they had returned the money.
The issue is that the loss they had caused me was not only what I had paid them, but the difference between what I had paid them and what I would have to spend buying the product without any Black Friday discount from another store. Really, Your Free Imei was responsible for the extra cost that the new purchase was going to entail for me due to an unjustified cancellation of my order with them. I felt ripped off also, in addition to being very angry at not having a sad response from him throughout the process.
More cases of negative opinions about Tuimeilibre
And of course, delving deeper, these days there are more cases like mine, I’m not the only one:
On Twitter there are several, about which Tuimeilibre was not responding.
The Resurrection of Tuimeilibre
Update 12/13/18:
The same night after posting this content, they finally emailed me. They told me that the order had been canceled “by mistake” from Administration and they offered to reactivate it and deliver it urgently. I told them, interested in seeing how they resolved, that yes, I was interested. The next day his boss called me and explained what had happened.
Apparently, in the summer they had changed logistics company, supposedly an ambitious bet for the better, from a local in Santiago de Compostela to another multinational in Alicante. Everything seemed to be going well, until 4 days after Black Friday they began to see that logistics was not covering all the shipments and was falling into a spiral of accumulating delays and changing codes. (well, I didn’t understand this very well…). Seeing that she was delivering so many orders late, he launched the December 7 mass email promising a compensation giftn.
Why the lack of customer service? Because had moved almost all of his team, except one person, (18 people) to Alicante to help expedite the issue of shipments, so that person did not even come close to responding to complaints. That the phone said it was out of hours… it was because when I was talking to another person, instead of “communicating”, the voice mail jumped, with that message (big mistake).
I was quite sorry for what happened but trying to put everything in their power to solve it. It helped me to put a face and eyes to the company, to see that there was a real team behind it and an intention to do things well (and I suppose to change the logistics company again…). It is seen that their supplier “did not expect” that they would sell so much on Black Friday.
He gave me a code to be able to make the order again with the same original conditions. And this Thursday I received the order.
Moral of this Black Friday nightmare
All that we talk about in Marketing4eCommerce about preparing Black Friday very carefully… it is clear that with examples like this it becomes especially relevant. It is an example of how a poor dimensioning of the expected results causes a collapse, a “death of success”, because they sold much more than what the logistics company had dimensioned that they were going to do.
It is also relevant to see how important after-sales service is. An administrative silence like the one that happened with me causes a considerable level of paranoia and a disastrous experience and memory of it.
Finally, that any crisis of reputation can be redirected if enough focus is put on it and it is an opportunity to build loyalty. I don’t know if I will ever buy more on your website, but at least they have radically changed the opinion with which I was leftwhich bordered on the scam, Russian roulette, towards a “well, it’s a modest ecommerce, which tries to do it well”.
Stay informed of the most relevant news on our news channel
Facebook Comments
Disqus