heatso.com

Quick Shipping, Terrible Customer Service After-Purchase

I simply cannot recommend ordering anything from Heatso at this time, until they learn what customer service is and establish basic business processes that ensure timely followup and communication about orders with customers impacted by inventory shortages.Under NO circumstances is it ever acceptable to blame your customer for not receiving something for which they paid your company money because they "didn't check the inventory." The customer has no way of truly verifying inventory on-hand accurately (inventory counts within inventory management systems are often inaccurate). This is YOUR job as the seller.I posted the experience below to a Sprinter van owner's group on Facebook with nearly 18,000 members and it was shocking how many people commented on my post citing similar issues with this company.Here's the background:I ordered an Espar D2 heater from Heatso, along with extra exhaust piping, an EasyStart Timer, an ambient temperature sensor, and a high altitude kit. I was live chatting with a Heatso representative on Facebook when I was placing my order and I mentioned that I intended to use the heater in my Sprinter van at altitudes where the high altitude kit would be necessary and made it clear I was going to order the high altitude kit.The package was shipped quickly and arrived later that week. I opened the box and found a lot of small parts and various packages within the shipping box, so I decided to leave the contents alone until it was time to install the heater, as I did not want to lose anything.When it came time to install the heater, I found that the high altitude kit was missing from the package. I messaged Heatso on Facebook, under the assumption that it was just a mistake and they had forgotten to include the part. Stuff happens.The response I got was that I was to blame for not checking THEIR inventory. Throughout the conversation, they continued to assign blame to me for not checking their inventory. However, they had no problem accepting $300USD from me for a part that they did not ship to me. Nor did they followup with me about not including the part in the order and say something like "Hey, we didn't ship this part because it is back ordered. We expect it to be available in X days/weeks, and will ship it out to you when it is back in stock." Instead, they just blindly accepted hundreds of dollars from me, didn't ship the part to me, and didn't follow up with me to set expectations on when I would receive the rest of my order.I have experience working in retail when I was younger, as well as designing inventory management systems for small businesses in university-level coursework, and designing interfaces with inventory management systems for car dealerships when I co-founded a startup. No matter how good an inventory management system is, none of them are perfect. Further, shrink (loss) occurs, and sometimes items that are ordered are not shipped out, followup is not done, and thus inventory surplus exists. This is why companies do physical inventory counts throughout the year (typically quarterly) and adjust counts in the system to match physical (on-hand) counts.Moreover, on Heatso's website at the time of this writing, a separate product listing for the standalone high altitude kit does NOT exist. A listing for the high altitude kit with a fuel pump exists, and you can add the high altitude kit to a heater package you are building with their online package configuration screen (at the time of order, the high altitude kit showed "check availability" on their package configuration screens and the high altitude kit with fuel pump showed in stock and an availability of "ships within 24 hours - this, coupled with the fact that the representative did not mention any inventory shortage or concern to me when I was chatting with them about the high altitude kit while placing the order led me to believe there was no inventory concern).Heatso's process should be to take the order, check their inventory and determine their ability to fulfill the order they have taken. If they are not able to fulfill all or part of the order, they should be reaching out to the customer and explaining why they are not able to fulfill the order (e.g. out of stock, part on back order, etc.) and setting expectations on when the customer should be receiving the parts that they are not able to immediately fulfill. They should also be providing the customer an option to cancel the order or receive a partial refund if they are not able to fulfill the order within a customer's needed timelines.This is customer service 101. This is "how to run a business" 101.

Date of experience: Dec 14, 2018