Good afternoon Zombies!
It's with a heavy heart that I have to write this post. In the last few months, I've noticed a decline in the customer service from Evil Shades Cosmetics. What was once a thriving indie cosmetics company with wonderful products and fantastic customer service/product turnaround has now turned into yet another indie business gone awry. I've put off this post for a few weeks, as the owner of Evil Shades Cosmetics and I were pretty close friends. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt that maybe she was having a rough time and therefore her business was suffering. Maybe, she'd turn it all around and get those refunds and orders out from November 2012. :/
But, I believe I have been fooled. I've noticed a growing number of loyal customers going without promised orders or refunds by reading the Evil Shades Facebook fan page, emails being ignored by Evil Shades, customers being blamed for their orders going missing, USPS being blamed for stealing/losing packages, etc. All of it is no longer making sense to me and sadly, I have come to the conclusion that quite a few people have been swindled.
I write this post based on fact- several close friends are Evil Shades customers waiting on an order or a refund from Evil Shades- some as old as November 2012. I too had placed an order in early October 2012 hoping to receive it before Halloween. Halloween came and went- Christmas came and went. I finally had to ask about my order, to which I received a "It was returned to me" response. The tracking # she sent me never updated once electronically, so I didn't understand how it would have come back to her without at least updating on the USPS website. She assured me another one was being mailed out- still no updates on the tracking # after weeks. January 2013 approached and I finally told her to just send me a refund as clearly the package was never going to make it to its destination. I did finally receive my refund of $12.00 and some change- but some people have just not been as lucky. (I also did receive a package from her- and the tracking # on the package wasn't even one that had been generated and emailed to me.)
Another close friend of mine (I've met her in person and have no reason to doubt her and was given permission to tell this story) entrusted the owner of Evil Shades (Andrea) with a fair amount of money to purchase some limited edition nail polish that Andrea had for sale- Andrea was having a rough time of it and had to make a cross country move to Colorado so was selling off some of her nail polish. Andrea had my friend PayPal her the funds on March 30th, 2013 (including shipping costs) and assured her she'd ship them that same week- they too met up once and had a nice time together in Colorado, so my friend really trusted Andrea. Weeks came and went and no polish. To this day, still no polish and no refund. Andrea told my friend that the polish was shipped to another customer on accident and that said customer would return it and Andrea would ship it to my friend. Not an update since, with the exception of Andrea telling my friend that she'd open up a claim with USPS (after asking my friend for her tracking # to check on it. Isn't that something she should have had?) to investigate where the package ended up. IF, she'd accidentally sent the package to a customer who was going to ship it back, why the need for a claim with USPS? Things are still not adding up to me.
I've also received a number of messages to the same effect- people missing orders from months ago, being told they'd receive a refund and not getting one, getting the run around and excuses from Andrea, etc. All of this going on, and an email notification went out recently for a Memorial Day's Sale at Evil Shades. Why on earth would she run a sale with the state of the business it is in was beyond me. Andrea claimed the email was sent out on accident and cancelled that sale. Why was the cart still functioning? Why hadn't she closed it down in order to get caught up on older orders? These are questions people had been asking and getting no direct response to. Finally on June 10th, 2013- I noticed that the Evil Shades website had been suspended.
I hope that Andrea has shut down the website in order to get caught up and all existing orders and refunds and intends to make it right by her customers. I realize sometimes life throws us hard times that are out of our control and that we must first take care of that before our business, but updating your customers is NOT too much to ask in those cases especially with indie customer/owner relationships these days. In the meantime, if the website opens again, I'd be very wary of placing an order until there is clear evidence that customers have been taken care of.
Please read this post as well regarding Evil Shades Cosmetics.
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