Not sure if this is the right forum to place this. Is it me or does TFAW customer support suck? I sent them an email last week on a ratio variant that I bought from them, paid $100 on it and I get it with several color break spine tics, and a few other issues. A guy Kyle responds back to me on Friday wanting pictures, which I provided to him on Friday. Then it becomes crickets from there and I have sent them an email at least twice now since Friday with no replies.
Is their support this bad? I am getting to the point of doing a chargeback on them, but I do have several other pre-orders with them that would probably get my account shutdown.
Any advice or thoughts from you guys that have been long time customers?
When I tried to get books they locked up prematurely before FOC (where they have the wrong FOC a week or two early) they don’t respond until after the real FOC date and then tell
Me “too bad…FOC has past.”
So yeah. They suck. And I can’t get their live help to work either, regardless of time of day or device.
That does suck that they did that to you. I wonder why Anthony then sends so much business their way if they have such terrible support. I’ll just wait to get the rest of my locked up pre-orders and then go through my CC company. Good thing that I also have a trail of emails with their lack of support.
Mention to them in an email you haven’t heard back and tell them you are going to do a charge back if you don’t hear back. It will get their attention. I have had my own issues with them. Not going to lie. But I also send a lot of business to Mycomicshop and Midtown. Depends on who has the comics available that I can link to.
Will let you in a major east coast retailer is looking to work with me to send them business in new comics and pre-orders so may be phasing them out in the future.
It was a $3 book. I was more upset about having to pay shipping for just the one book I didn’t want. When I tried to explain how their FOC was not accurate they said they could cancel the book but would prohibit me from being able to have any more pre-orders. I couldn’t believe they would do this over $3…for an obvious error on their part.
I was trying to be factual, provided all the evidence from previews and penguin. It was pretty unbelievable…I guess I got someone with an ego.
Unfortunately I had the 1:25 Extreme Venomverse 4 on pre-order as well, so wasn’t about to lose that book over $3 dispute.
Since then the original subject book has been pushed back twice…so it just sits there unprocessed for several months and will now just get grouped with other books. But I watch their FOC dates a lot closer. They seem to just run with the original FOC and don’t update it when books slide to the right.
Thanks for the tip Anthony! I’ll do that tomorrow and see where it goes. I do have quite a few preorders still with them and would hate to lose those, but they just do not seem to care over there.
Hopefully the east coast retailer pans out and they are better than these guys.
D-Rog, I don’t blame you in fear of losing pre-orders over a $3 dispute. I’d be the same way, it’s that mine is the Edge of Spider-Verse #3 1:100 that I got caught up in paying $100 for. Granted it has still been holding that price on eBay for right now, yet the one I bought off of eBay for cheaper a week before getting the TFAW one was in 9.8 condition. Very frustrating these days ordering from some of these places as you know they are probably also going through the books cherry picking the 9.8’s and then sending us the junk at times. I can’t believe they kept messing with the FOC date and then not helping you out.
Their customer service sucks cause it’s primarily Kyle as the only one who has the balls to stick around as it seems they can’t ever get anyone else to stick around or even join the team. So be nice to him, all he does is get shit on all day from grumpy people. And be nice to all customer service people in fact, they’re doing their best and they’re humans too, probably trying to work their way out of their shitty job.
I no longer use TFAW, I did for a few years but I had several issues with them. Some concerning issues were -
#1 No free bag and boards…Come on, even my LCS offers this.
#2 No Paypal…seriously!!!
#3 Single issues were shipped poorly. In an envelope… for real?
#4 The deal breaker - Some of my pre-orders were not being shipped to me, of course it was only for the really hot book that came out, not the ones they got stuck with on their shelf.
I am pretty content with Mycomicshop, and Midtown.
By the time you add in the costs of bags, boards and upgraded protective shipping (which they didn’t offer until recently) their prices on regular books are not any better than more reliable online retailers.
They’re only good for two things in my book:
Price on incentive variants
combining purchases of miscellaneous pre-release books over several weeks and having them shipped monthly (when you’re not concerned about the speed you get the order).
I’ve rarely found myself falling into either of the two categories in the past couple years.
I’ve stopped using them and they absolutely refused to delete my account. They state because of the way pre-orders work they are unable to delete accounts? I don’t understand how that is if I have no pending orders from them, but they absolutely refused to delete my account or payment information. They are honestly are trash business.
The issue is that I am working with Kyle and not Max, and Kyle has gone dark. I understand his job sucks and he may not be happy, but at the end of the day we are the customers and someone over there has to fix our issues we report. I’ve been cordial with him in every single email that I have sent, but at what point do you say screw this niceness which isn’t getting me a resolution?
Just an update, Kyle finally got back to me and gave me a full refund which was cool that he did that. The crazy part is that he tells me they have no more copies in stock of this book to send me a replacement, yet you go to the web site and you can buy it. Ugh, I just wanted a replacement. LOL!