Today's post is about an unfortunate event that occured to me earlier this year. I was browsing some nail blogs (because that's what nail bloggers do!) and I came across a swatch of OPI I Lily Love You.
What a gorgeous flakie! the collection came out while I was taking my blogging sabbatical last summer and apparently that particular shade sold out pretty quickly.
I looked around at a few e-tailers and came across mbeautylounge.com
This was my first time on the site but it looked legitimate and nice. It had websafe check out and a good shipping policy and the prices were incredible!
I ordered 2 bottles of I Lily Love You, along with 2 OPI Mrs America, 2 OPI Nikki Minaj, and 1 OPI from the France collection.
The company is located about an hour away from where I live in Ohio so I thought I would be receiving my package very quickly. However, it took over 10 days of processing before my package was shipped out! This was much longer than the 48-72 hours promised on the website...
Regardless, my box finally got here! hooray! I opened it up, excited to see my new pretties but was shocked by the fact that the polishes were simply thrown in the box with some tissue paper. No bubble wrap. No foam peanuts. What was this person thinking?? Gladly, the trip wasn't very long and all of the bottles arrived in one piece. Good right?
Here is what I received:
Looks pretty good no? but where is I Lily Love You, you ask? That's what I wondered as well. I looked through the box and found a slip of paper with my order. I Lily Love You was striked off and the word credited was handwritten. How disappointing! they must have sold out right?
I logged on to my Mbeautylounge account and checked to see if I had any credits or vouchers but found nothing... I then went to the OPI section and found that I Lily Love You was still there. With the option to add it to your cart. So it wasn't sold out?
I decided to send a polite message to the company via their "contact us" page asking what happened to my order. I hit send and was promised an answer within 48 hours.
after 3 days with no answer, I sent another message. Briefer than the first but still polite. Again, no answer...
10 days later, I wrote them a pretty extensive message asking to be given a refund (it was $16 worth of polish!). I also told them I would be reviewing their company on my blog (as I am doing now).
A day later I received a message from them to tell me a voucher had been created for the amount I was owed. It could be found on my account on Mbeautylounge.com
Finally! after about a month of messaging, it looks like there is someone over at Mbeautylounge after all! Since I was prepping for the giveaway that just ended, I decided to use the voucher to get some polishes for you guys. I didn't trust Mbeautylounge but I sure as heck was not going to let them keep my $16! So I order 3 bottles of Zoya: Ivanka, Valerie, and Charla.
After about 12 days of processing, here is what I received:
This time Charla was missing! what is up with this company?? the order slip once again claimed that I had been "credited"... I did send a message to the company about the missing polish but I am much to exhausted to deal with them any more.
Overall, Mbeautylounge is not a place I will be ordering from any more. They have great prices and a variety of collections but this was not worth it.
Oh well, live and learn right?
have you ever had to deal with a dodgy company before?
Until next time ^_^
**EDIT** About 2 months since my last email, MBeautyLounge just issued me a refund for the missing Zoya. Can't promise they will do the same for you but it looks like patience pays off with this company...
16 comments :
This is a really helpful post. I am always very hesitant to buy things online and it is hard to research every single possible nail polish virtual store. I would have given up as well, and even then, you were polite about the whole situation. Thanks for the info <3
Thanks for the warning! That has to be extremely annoying!
Yikes! Won't be buying from them, thanks for the warning.
oh wow thanks for sharing sam! really helpful for people like me who have to pay for overseas shipping and would be really pissed not to get my full order
That really sucks.
It is really unprofessional of them to strike off the polish you ordered and just throw in whatever nail polish color they choose to. At least they should notify you and let you choose another color or cancel the order all together. I will make sure not to order from them in a future.
UGH that sucks! What horrible customer service! Sorry you had to deal with that!
I'm sorry you had to deal with them. I had a similar experience some time back when I was looking for OPI DS Glamour. I've found the nailboardshopssavvy notepad on MakeupAlley helpful in avoiding bad sellers, though how often it gets updated, I'm not sure.
Im glad you find it helpful! If I can help someone else then it wasn't such a loss :)
It was but oh well.. glad I can help! :D
Yikes! I can imagine! I would be terribly upset if that were the case
Thanks Bethany.With such a connected polish community Im not sure how long they will last if they keep this up
Thanks Karen. I will definitely be looking through it next time I am looking at a new shop
thank you for sharing
nice work keep it up
MBeautylounge aka my worst online shopping experience ever.
I apologize in advance, this will take a while, but I have a lot of very bad things to say about this company.
So here is my story: I was desperately looking for ZOYA nail polishes which are hard to come by in Europe. On some nail artist website (I can’t remember which nail artist), I saw that she recommended MBeautylounge and that they sold ZOYA polishes (and quite cheap). The website seemed legit, it said that they accepted PayPal transactions so on 16 March 2014, over five months ago, I placed an order of 97$ (around 70€) worth of nail polishes.
Right after the transaction though, I realised that I had not been paying with PayPal, that this option was not actually available (I was tired that day, never buy stuff when you are tired :D). I started to question the legitimacy of the website and searched for reviews. And then, I flipped. All the reviews were absolutely terrible. I sent a message to the helpdesk of MBeautylounge to cancel the order right away (also on 16 March), then I contacted my bank to cancel the transaction but they said they could not do such a thing.
I was getting desperate, but on 25 March 2014 I received the following message from the helpdesk: “Thank you for contacting Mbeauty Lounge. I have messaged my supervisor, once your order is canceled it takes 7-14 business days for payment to reflect on your card mam” (yes, they did call me “mam” and misspelled “cancelled”). However unprofessionally written, I thought that they would stick to their word and so I waited for two weeks. But still nothing. Worse, my order was suddenly marked as shipped even though I had not received any shipping notification!
And it only got worse. I wrote to them again asking for my refund (or at least for a confirmation that the products had indeed been shipped, which I don’t believe they were) but did not receive any satisfactory answer. I tried being nice, being angry, I tried launching a complaint on the Better Business Bureau, I tried begging them for an answer and nothing worked. It seems like they really believe I must be quite stupid since on 25 June they sent me the following message: “ Thank you for contacting Mbeauty Lounge. sorry for the delay, I will notify the shipping dept of this issue. IF your order was lost we will get another right out to you” to which I replied the following: “Hi, Thank you but this is not what I am asking for. I asked for the cancellation of my order on the very same day that I placed it and on 25 March (3 months ago!) you said that you would cancel my order and that the payment would take 7-14 business day to reflect on my card. What I am asking is that you honour what you said and refund me.” They of course did not answer and closed the topic. But on 27 August when I tried to contact them again, they sent me the very same message. Word for word.
So here you have it. This company is a scam, they don’t accept PayPal even though their website says so, they are not authorised retailer for ZOYA and OPI does not authorise them to use their name either. They don’t have a phone number or address anywhere (lesson learned: if you can’t find any phone number or address on a company’s website: don’t buy from them, they are not legit!). They have about a hundred complaints registered on the Better Business Bureau. I lost my money as I don’t think I will ever get a refund nor my nail polishes, but if I can save you from going through the same trouble, I guess this story will have at least one positive outcome.
If you managed to read the whole thing, have a good day and and don’t get scammed ;)
Cheers,
Sarah
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