Sometimes you get what you pay for…
One of the cool things about a blog is that it’s not static, meaning that you can make updates as new information becomes available. In other words, when I’m wrong, I can tell you.
Remember this post? I was excited to join a new book swap.
Mea culpa. I made a huge mistake.
The company has a long way to go in terms of customer service and working out the kinks. As a small business owner myself, I understand that glitches happen, things go wrong, mistakes are bound to crop up. But the measure of a good business is how you deal with those mistakes. This is not paperbackswap.com’s forte and I believe, perhaps its ultimate downfall.
This is the scoop: I received requests for three of my books at different times. I sent two without incident. On last Friday, after lunch, I received a request for the third book. I was to mail it by Sunday, which was impossible with my schedule. I sent a notification that it would take an additional day. As it turned out, I couldn’t mail it until Wednesday. I sent a note to the requester who said, “No problem”. The company sent me an email reminder on Wednesday after I had sent the book; I indicated that I had sent it. On today, I received an email that the request was automatically canceled by the company for my failure to reply (which I had done). I checked the FAQs and they weren’t helpful, so I went to the “Contact” page. I called the company and left a message asking how to proceed; I did let them know that I was not happy about the entire incident. Their reply? When I logged into my account an hour later, I got an “Account Frozen” message with the following post:
Account closed, at your request. We are sorry that we cannot telephone members personally. If you would like to communicate with us, please contact us by email at librarian@paperbackswap.com.
I did send an email and received no reply.
If this is the level of customer service to expect, then this is not the experience that I thought it would be. So just say no to paperbackswap.com! Sorry that I recommended them, I should have taken them for a longer test drive before I created the post. Lesson learned. Save yourself a little heartache, and avoid them altogether.
April 1st, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Have you heard of Bookmooch (bookmooch.com). It provides a similar service, which several friends and I have been using for awhile now with great success.
April 3rd, 2007 at 3:23 am
Wow - I’m sorry to hear you had such a bad experience with Paperback Swap. I’ve been participating in it for about a year now and have only had very good experiences!
April 5th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Well I’d bet their system is probably automated to do what it did with the request. There has to be time constraints otherwise us members would never get our books. Your experience sounds very odd to me. Something must have went wrong. I have had great experiences with PaperBackSwap and their customer service.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Tom, to be clear, I wasn’t so much offended by the automated reply about the dates as the response from the company - though I think in a situation when people are relying on Media Mail, you can’t be all that nutty about an extra day or two, especially when the date to mail the package is on a day that the post office isn’t even open. I realized that there must have been a glitch in what had happened, which is why I went to the contact page. On the contact page, there are two names (officers) and one phone number. I thought emailing the officers would be intrusive, so I gave the company a call. The reply email was, I thought, in poor taste. It is my personal opinion that good companies care about customer service. I just didn’t get that impression from paperbackswap.com.