My order is now in dispute with paypal because it was not shipped in June as was promised with the original order
By participating in a group buy, you inherently agree to put forth the money for the creation of a custom, made-to-order product that is not easily available elsewhere.
The majority of the money is not with the group buy leader, and the GB leader, in most cases, is not a vendor who is obligated to kiss your feet and provide Amazon-like customer service by bending over and letting you go to town with your self-entitlement in tow. You're not buying something that's in stock, and delays are very common. Not understanding that and making a beeline for Paypal is equivalent to burning all bridges. Nobody would want to do any business w/ you when you have a track record of jumping the gun and crying to Paypal. You're trying to take the money out of the pocket of the GB leader who is trying to provide a community service, and actively communicating with you in a cordial manner to resolve the current situation.
And that's ****ed up.
No, it's ****ed up to get lied to. He mentioned he did not mess up and then mentioned how he messed up. He said he had everything when he didn't. Multiple people are confused as to what he actually has. He said he was waiting on switches, boxes, and a soldering iron but now mine is supposed to be shipped next week? Probably another lie. I gave my money to someone expecting honesty. I will gladly burn any bridge necessary to watch this lying sack of **** burn now
edit: This is kind of funny at this point. I actually own a custom order business that makes things out of plastics. If I was a month late I would be expected to return the money or be in small claims court. It wouldn't matter how much I or my vendors had messed up. I would definitely not be able to continue to have a business if I threatened a customer in any way like changing their order status because they wanted to know where I messed up and what the new expected delivery was. Most people want to know if their order is going to come this year.
I understand that it is painful for your expectations to not be met, but I feel your experience as a business owner is probably skewing your perspective a little here. xondat is not running a business that sells products (even custom ones) on a regular basis, and as such has no hard data to base shipping estimates on, only the estimations of the suppliers he worked with. I'm also assuming that he doesn't have the ability to see the future, but that's probably a safe bet.
If you take a look at past GBs ran here, you will find that most of them do have some degree of slip on shipping dates, because it isn't possible to make
accurate estimations for irregular one-off productions like these.
Given that you were unhappy with the timeline and communication, you could have just contacted xondat directly and requested a refund. Your first reaction did not have to be the nuclear option of attacking him in a public forum and opening a PayPal dispute.
