While I realize that tires are apparently hard to come by as of late, this experience sucked from the standpoint of an internal company failure and a lack of seller information in the face of less than adequate availability.
I placed an order for tires for my 450, and unfortunately because of the front tire size it's challenging to get both tires in the same brand. I wanted a 90/90-19 for the front and a 100/90-18 for the rear. I like Shinko but they don't offer a 90/90-19, and not wanting to spend roughly $200 or more plus shipping (if it applies) for 2 Heidenaus I decided to get a Shinko 712 for the rear and the Heidenau K65 for the front. Midwest Traction in Iowa and Accessories International in Miami had the best prices on them and Midwest Traction offered free shipping on any order over $100. Accessories International was actually a little cheaper for the tires but no free shipping threshold, so the order would have been almost $40 more through them. So I placed the order with Midwest Traction, paid with PayPal and got the confirmation. Great... or so I thought.
A week goes by with no other email related to the purchase. Curious, so this morning I emailed the address shown in the PayPal purchase confirmation and it bounced back undeliverable. Now I'm starting to get aggravated. I went to their website and used their contact us to send them an internal email and included the invoice ID number. No reply for hours. My wife and I go out to run some errands and the usual litany of robocalls come in, but one of them leaves me a voicemail. Turns out the voicemail wasn't from a robocall, it was from Midwest Traction. The message said their online sales system wasn't properly communicating with their order system and he needed my information. No problem, I called them once we got home. (side note, when you're already aggravated at something, having to listen to someone's fairly lengthy voicemail 3 times just to get the full phone number someone rattles off at the very end and too fast to write down only adds to the aggravation, and he heard about that from me as well) So I get him on the phone and find out they don't have anything about my order except my name and how much of my money they got. Invoice ID be damned, apparently it gave them nothing about my order. So not only do they not have my address, they don't even know what I bought... but wait, there's more - when I told him what I'd ordered, he told me they don't have the Heidenau tire and have no idea when they will. So, they offer tires for sale that they know they don't have and can't get and they let you put them in the cart and actually pay for them before letting you know LATER, even when the system IS working properly. So if they actually had all my info, how would that have worked? Free shipping for orders over $100, yet the order would only have been about $60 for the Shinko rear and I gave them $164 for both... so they'd send me 1 tire and apologies (which, by the way, they weren't very forthcoming with any despite the whole fiasco being their system's fault) while charging me shipping for the one tire and then what, refunding me the rest? And as it turns out, the email address that bounced back was for an individual ([email protected]) and the guy I spoke to said that email address was tied to the lack of communication between halves of their online sales process. So apparently Joe is no longer with them (or other explanation the customer shouldn't have to be concerned with) and they didn't bother to tie up the loose ends while still taking orders that would sit there until the purchaser decided to find out what was going on.
Not the way to do business IMO.
I placed an order for tires for my 450, and unfortunately because of the front tire size it's challenging to get both tires in the same brand. I wanted a 90/90-19 for the front and a 100/90-18 for the rear. I like Shinko but they don't offer a 90/90-19, and not wanting to spend roughly $200 or more plus shipping (if it applies) for 2 Heidenaus I decided to get a Shinko 712 for the rear and the Heidenau K65 for the front. Midwest Traction in Iowa and Accessories International in Miami had the best prices on them and Midwest Traction offered free shipping on any order over $100. Accessories International was actually a little cheaper for the tires but no free shipping threshold, so the order would have been almost $40 more through them. So I placed the order with Midwest Traction, paid with PayPal and got the confirmation. Great... or so I thought.
A week goes by with no other email related to the purchase. Curious, so this morning I emailed the address shown in the PayPal purchase confirmation and it bounced back undeliverable. Now I'm starting to get aggravated. I went to their website and used their contact us to send them an internal email and included the invoice ID number. No reply for hours. My wife and I go out to run some errands and the usual litany of robocalls come in, but one of them leaves me a voicemail. Turns out the voicemail wasn't from a robocall, it was from Midwest Traction. The message said their online sales system wasn't properly communicating with their order system and he needed my information. No problem, I called them once we got home. (side note, when you're already aggravated at something, having to listen to someone's fairly lengthy voicemail 3 times just to get the full phone number someone rattles off at the very end and too fast to write down only adds to the aggravation, and he heard about that from me as well) So I get him on the phone and find out they don't have anything about my order except my name and how much of my money they got. Invoice ID be damned, apparently it gave them nothing about my order. So not only do they not have my address, they don't even know what I bought... but wait, there's more - when I told him what I'd ordered, he told me they don't have the Heidenau tire and have no idea when they will. So, they offer tires for sale that they know they don't have and can't get and they let you put them in the cart and actually pay for them before letting you know LATER, even when the system IS working properly. So if they actually had all my info, how would that have worked? Free shipping for orders over $100, yet the order would only have been about $60 for the Shinko rear and I gave them $164 for both... so they'd send me 1 tire and apologies (which, by the way, they weren't very forthcoming with any despite the whole fiasco being their system's fault) while charging me shipping for the one tire and then what, refunding me the rest? And as it turns out, the email address that bounced back was for an individual ([email protected]) and the guy I spoke to said that email address was tied to the lack of communication between halves of their online sales process. So apparently Joe is no longer with them (or other explanation the customer shouldn't have to be concerned with) and they didn't bother to tie up the loose ends while still taking orders that would sit there until the purchaser decided to find out what was going on.
Not the way to do business IMO.