You all have it really good here :)

M

maxmk8

Registered
This is about an experience I have had on another car forum.
I'm going to stick to facts like I did in the other forum...

1. I purchased wheels from a forum vendor
2. The wheels were not of a very good quality (finish was chipped in places). Since the wheels only cost $340 for 2 shipped I figured I'd be better off just putting them on than having to pay shipping 2 ways to get new ones.
3. I made a post about this in the forum with pics of the damaged finish.
4. I didn't contact the vendor until after I made the post just letting others know that the wheels are not quite OEM quality in terms of finish and although I am satisfied for the price others may not be, NEVER bashing the vendor.
5. I got my thread locked and a warning from a moderator saying that I am badmouthing the vendor for no reason.
6. I contacted the mod and I wanted to post a thank you note to him in my locked thread since after the vendor saw my thread he refunded me $100 of my purchase price.
7. Another mod ERASED my entire thread and wrote me a threatening PM telling me he has no problem banning me from the board. And he told me to STOP talking to the mod that originally PMed ME about the thread he LOCKED!

So cliffs notes:
Bought some wheels that were of a bad quality, posted on a board advising others of the quality... got the post erased and almost got banned while receiving 5 threatening notes from mods, who called me whiny and immature and “not man enough”.

Yay!!!

Here is a pic of the finish quality...


IMG_0629.jpg
 
Make sure you keep wax on those, those pinholes might cause some corrosion if any moisture can get behind there....
 
arggg... this wasn't it markviii.org ;) I'm just saying this is a great place we as members have a lot of freedoms other forums don't allow. And the mods here are very understanding and good ppl :).
 
Ok, I'm actually going to take the side of the other forum on this one. DON'T FLAME ME PLEASE... just hear me out. Posting this info on the forum before even giving the vendor a chance to make good was where you went wrong. You should have first contacted him with your complaint. If this vendor was worth his salt he would have offered you a refund or exchange or whatever in order to make it right. Vendors dont' always have complete control over the products they sell, sometimes poor quality slips through the cracks no matter how vigilant he can be about quality control, there is no such thing as 100%. The wheels may have been in boxes and he may not be able to inspect every single one.

Once given the chance to make good and satisfy you you then had two courses to follow:
1) If he makes good and gives you good service you could have then praised him on the forum.
2) If he refused and gave you bad service then you had the right to publicly complain and I bet the other forum would have been more understanding.

Buy complaining before even giving him a chance was not fair to the vendor who, as it appears, would have taken care of you from the start. So now what has happened is you have besmirched his reputation because people read your post and will likely hesitate buying from him because of it.

Here's an example that happened to me just a few months ago... I sent a shipment to a first time client in CA who is a frequent poster on one of the detailing forums. He ordered on a Fri eve. and his order shipped USPS on Sat. morning. The following Thursday he posted that we ripped him off and never sent the order and ranted on and on about slow shipping. In the meantime he never contacted us once to inquire about his order. I first heard of it when I read it online along with many comments from people advising him how to get his money back and otherwise sticking their noses into something that was none of their business. We always ship USPS or UPS with a tracking number so I looked it up and saw that he received the parcel the day before his post! I sent him an email advising him of this and I assume he must have found it because his posts stopped. But never an apology, never a post about how he was wrong. So I posted the info and he then looked the fool. I then asked the forum to delete the thread and they did. Point is though, enough people saw this guy's post and may remember it... damage done.

Always contact the vendor first and give him a chance to make good, you may find yourself posting a more complete story from the start.

This forum handles this correctly, product and vendor reviews need to be approved by a mod first... at least I hope that is still the case.
 
I had a somewhat same deal with another vendor over wheels long ago. They were advertised as triple plated show chrome, specially designed for his business to fit only the Mark 8s. They never fit. I dealt with him and it got ugly. I posted on the forum with pictures and it got uglier. I had to machine spacers for them to fit. Within a year the chrome was peeling off. I’ve tried selling them but no one wants them.

Another instance was a Cobra R style hood. The hood showed up damaged and was probably the worst ever aftermarket hood I’ve seen. Dealing with the vendor got me no where because he was a bully and used to pushing people around. So it got ugly too. I posted the pics and it got once again even uglier. I ended up building my own. The cost of the hood and building my own combined was over $1800. That vendor has changed names at least 3 times as far as I know. I didn’t have the time or felt like bothering to take either one to court so I ended up sucking it up. What I’m saying is it doesn’t always come out good.

I have to agree with Leo on this. Being a vendor also I deal with this stuff a lot more than most vendors because it deals mostly with tuning. You should always give the vendor a chance to take care of you. Too often this doesn’t happen in my type of business. The very first thing they do is start posting on the forums. This empowers them when they do this and often times in my line is filled with half truths. One another site this same discussion is going on, this is what I posted. This is examples of what I deal with on a weekly basis

I have posted some of it in the FAQ #19 of my website. What people don’t realize is that a lot of us tuners actually do get along and talk to each other. Just since the beginning of this year I know of 2 tuners that have pulled out of the mail order tuning business due to reasons in that link and then some. We talk about how to best deal with these situations and the ones that no matter what you can’t make them happy. I’m not going to posts other tuner’s experiences, that’s second hand. I will tell you that currently I have 3 that I’m dealing with.
 
I have to do this in sections since I can only post 1000 charactors at a time.

#1, Prior customer from a couple years back. Began getting CELs for the Trans shortly after my programming. I bent over backwards for the guy trying to trouble shoot. Now when a tuner does this the customer then gets a feeling of total control over the tuner and then insisted or demands they fix the vehicle. I’ll get to how in a minute.

The customer of course blamed the programming right off the bat since that was his only change. I sent program after program to him in order to try and figure out what was causing the CELs. Now I’ve explained this before and it’s also in the link above. If you have a failing part in your Trans or it’s worn out performance programming will bring this out. Most refuse to believe this, just as this customer did. When he returned the vehicle back to stock no more CEL but when he installed the programming the CEL would come back. A couple more programs to try and prove it to the customer to no avail of course. This when on for quite some time by the way and I spent a lot of time on these programs and diagnosing.

I knew what was wrong with the Trans, it had a bad clutch pack is what I presumed. Darrin of BCA talked with the customer for me after I exhausted my efforts. This customer took his car to Darrin who then tore the Trans apart and found that it was indeed a burnt clutch pack from a stuck check valve. Darrin called me to confirm what I suspected. The customer left Darrin’s shop claiming the car never ran better.

Shortly after that the TC started acting up. I get a call from the customer again. First it’s questions of could it be the programming. That turned into it’s the programming he knows it is. I called Darrin and we sat on the phone for a couple hours trouble shooting again. We concluded that it has to be a bad TCC sol valve. Darrin had him bring the car back and once the TCC was pulled and read out it was found to be bad and replaced. This was the factory valve from that very car. Once again the customer is on his way.

I get a call a month or so ago from the customer. He has the Extreme Tuner package and during his adjustments he tunes the car past its limits and now the car won’t run. I explain to him what he had done and not to do that because it will damage the vehicle. He tells me that his injector pulse is also dropping when the car shifts. I’m not sure why or what he did to cause this. He orders a new program in hopes that this solves the problem and he has a new program to start from. I get an email later that says the new program is basically doing the same thing. In his words “vehicle not running correctly after you changed the programming”. It wasn’t running before the programming either. In my mind that means the problem isn’t my programming, there’s something else going on.
 
Lets side track for a minute; I do more than just sit at the computer or phone waiting for people to call me. I have a business to run, I’ve explained this before. If you want to reach me right away you need to call me. If you get the voice mail leave a message, I return all my calls. Otherwise if you email me it may take a couple days, to a week or so before I get to it. Customers that show up here are 1st priority, phone messages, mail orders and then emails in that order. When I get through with those then I can hit the forums unless someone points me to a thread that needs addressed. I get a lot of emails each day, sometimes up around 75 a day. They are answered in the order they came in. I also save every email that I receive and send out.

The customer emails me with data logs asking me to review them. In a single day I will receive up to 10 of these types of emails. Some aren’t even my customers, they just want me to read their data logs and tell them what is wrong with their vehicle. 90% of them don’t even provide a complete set of data to even try and evaluate. I tell explain to them that this takes time from my normal work day and to only be fair I need to charge them for the service. They get all pissed off when they hear this. I looked over the customer’s data logs and didn’t see anything that would tell me why his vehicle is acting up. I informed the customer of this and explained to him that I normally charge for this. I didn’t charge this guy for it though. He went off on me cussing at me. Ok, the vehicle from my understanding is doing the exact same thing it was doing before he got the programming from me. The vehicle was running fine until he started making his own adjustments to old programming. This to me sounds like he’s got a problem that isn’t related to my programming. I could be wrong but so far everything points to the vehicle. (A program/tune will not fix an electrical or mechanical problem) So I’m assuming this guy has another problem with his vehicle and needs to figure it out. After all, he’s accused my programming as being the problem in the past twice now already and it wasn’t. And now, why should I help someone out that is now cussing me out when I’ve been nothing but polite?

A couple days later when I had time I reviewed his logs again, then went over the programming from the very first tune I wrote him all the way to the latest one that isn’t working. I then wrote a brand new program without looking at the others for a reference. I then compared all the programs. Nothing at all stood out that would cause the issues he’s having. This took me over 11 hours to accomplish. He’s running stock injectors so why would I change his injector parameters?
 
I don’t hear anything back from the customer until I get a couple phone calls, a PM and some emails that I need to go to a thread at this forum because it needs some attention. The thread is the other one that gravitated to dealing with problem customers like this one. This is what I find;

At least your's is running ok.. Mine is still hosed, and I can't get attention cause everything is my fault... My credit card is still being billed even though its not fixed.

Tell me why my fuel pulse drops as RPM increases. Tell me why it drops to almost nothing after a gear change. Gotta be a car problem right? Can't be the tune telling it do that, right? Why do I give it more throttle and the fuel pulse decreases? I've replaced the TPS, no change. I've given up on help cause all I hear is it's my fault and I need to be charged for dyno time cause I'm taking advantage of the tuner. I gave up.

You know what started this? I did a simple flash to drop rpm at shift time. Check out this graph. Why does the acceleration drop significantly before the gear change? My fault? Why does the fuel pulse decrease as RPM increase? My fault? After I made a simple change in RPM my car was no longer drivable! I gave it throttle, fuel pulse decreased. Must be my fault, right?

Must be a ground or something wrong with my car. That's gotta explain why fuel pulse drops why throttle is WOT and rpm increase. Yeah. Gotta be it.

I'm 100% scared to death to touch it again. Will run for driving to work? Who knows! If I flash it, I'm scared I won't be able to drive it again for a week and then be blaimed for taking advantage of my tuner an owing him for a dyno tune while I'm just trying to drive back and forth to work. Has to be something I did wrong. You know, a flash is so touchy.

Just like the tranny. As I explained what it was doing, it was impossible. Had to be my fault. But after almost a full year and lots of back and forth, it was fixed. That was different, I was listened to then. Now I'm the crazy guy with the car that can't be doing what it's doing. Gotta be me. Gotta be a ground or something.

Oh well. Prehaps best Bambi took out the Vic. Might be put of it is missery like the deer was.
Click to expand...

I emailed the customer and explain to him that I didn’t appreciate his post and ask him why he thinks that this is my responsibility to trouble shoot his vehicle. I then called him and left a voice mail. I also sent him another program to test with in the email. He removed the post and emailed me back with:

You had your chance. You refused to listen. You didn't read emails. You didn't look at the files I gave you.
It runs like [censored]. You did nothing to help other than threaten to charge me for dyno work when it wouldn't [censored] run.

I have NO problem posting my experiences. And will openly now.

You want war? No [censored] problem. I've saved every one of your emails.
Click to expand...
 
He’s sent a few other emails also I won’t post. I called again the next day leaving another voice mail. I didn’t receive any call backs but did get more emails. He has threatened to post on the forums since I won’t drop everything I’m doing and devote what ever it takes to fix his vehicle. This is what I was referring to above when the customer feels his got to control the tuner, they do it with threats just like this. I deal with this at least a dozen times a month. And even after this I’ve sent this customer another program to test with. So now he’s searching out my posts and making comment right after each of mine just to let me know he’s there and taunt me.

This is why the mail order custom tuners are calling it quits and will only deal with customers in person. You can’t win with these people. I’m not saying that the majority of customers is bad, so don’t take me the wrong way. It’s the 10% that are the problems and you spend 90% of your time dealing with them. Of this 10% I would say about 80% of the time it is something they did to the vehicle. The majority of the time it’s wiring, especially when it comes to the MAFs and swaps. You have another percentage that don’t give you the correct info on the vehicle so the tune is wrong. They like to try and order a Mild NA program for a vehicle that has ported heads, after market cams and larger TB. Then when the car doesn’t run correctly it’s the tune. Well of course it is, if they weren’t so cheap and tried to get away with using a custom program for a stock vehicle maybe they would have gotten the correct programming. The others are similar to this example where parts have failed and not because of the programming. And of course, I have messed up a few times. If you run across a tuner that says he hasn’t you need to run away.
 
#2. 98 vehicle with a 00 Mustang engine/trans swap. Car ran perfect for a year and a half. Customer installs a homemade CAI that is down under the front bumper. He then drives through water and locks up the engine breaking some rods. He replaces the engine with one from an 03 Mustang. They use all the same old parts right down the injectors and MAF. The programming they had from me for all practical purposes should work fine. Well the car doesn’t run and when it does it pours black smoke out the tail pipes. I get a call telling me that my programming is wrong and I need to fix it. Once I find out the story I inform them on the phone that the program they have is fine. They have something wrong with the install, bad MAF, injectors or O2 sensors. They want me to give them a new tune for the new engine. I inform them again that they don’t need a new program and if I do build a new one they would have to pay for it. Then the cussing starts, they feel that I should build a new program to make the car run correctly and for free because the one they have now doesn’t work and it’s my fault. I calmly explain to them again how it works and get cussed out again. Now I’m being threatened just like above if I don’t give them a free program. Tired of arguing with them I take their old program and update it. I’m always improving my programming as I find new things from similar vehicles that work. So I send them this new program and of course nothing changes because it isn’t the programming. So now they are threatening me if I don’t figure out what is wrong with the vehicle. That’s not my responsibility, these people have it in their heads that once I provide a program for them that I’m now totally responsible for anything that happens to the vehicle. So I’m at a face off with this one also.

#3. The guy buys a PRP from me and can’t figure out how to use it. He’s got the handbook and I provided him with a program to get him started. It’s been 7 months now and he’s not been able to dial in his vehicle. He is constantly calling me to help him tune his car. He won’t buy a Wide Band and is constantly sending me data logs. He then insists that I teach him how to tune. I’m sorry but that isn’t my job. In the first place when I first started selling PRP I did help out my customers with tuning. In the end it bit me in the butt. Out of the first 12 PRPs I sold 8 of them became dealers and increased my competition. Second, the PRP is a do it yourself package. If you want support theirs a forum and SCT has a Tech Line that people actually get paid to assist you with your tuning. Where as the dealer/tuner is not in any way responsible for teaching you.

Now this customer I’ve helped out with a few things and sent him in the right direction at least half a dozen times. He would call me almost daily and fill my voice mail up on the weekends. I couldn’t get it through his head that I’m not responsible for teaching him and he still didn’t have the right equipment. So he sends his PRP back to me and wants a refund because he can’t use it and I won’t teach him. There is no refund on software. I shipped it back and explained it to him but he doesn’t see it. So once again I’m being threatened because in his eyes I have piss poor customer service.

#4. While writing this novel I been on the phone with another customer. Almost the same as #2. He hasn’t started cussing or threatening me yet but he’s got a second swap that the car is not running with the programming. 95 vehicle, had an 01 engine and my programming. It ran fine for 2 years. He now swapped in an 04 engine and it won’t run. It’s the programming, he’s positive of it and wants me to fix the programming or tell him why the car won’t run.
 
The whole scenario you've outlined is why I am more or less suprised that any of you qualified tuners would even handle mail order tunes, with the exeption of maybe (maybe) a brand new vehicle, as there are so many items that can be a non tuneable issues that opens you up to all this grief.

Although I am sure there are plenty of mail order tunes sold with few problems ,as you've stated, I just can't help but believe that an real live tune session brings much better results all around. If for nothing else it gets people face to face, and pictures are worth a thousand words, technicals asside.

Great reading Lonnie.
 
All good info. I think what Max was trying to get across has to do with how lucky we are here that our moderators treat people here with respect, and we also do our best to keep each other informed of what's going on. Sure, we're not perfect, but I really do think that each one of the moderators here really put in a lot of time to make sure people are treated fairly.

Vendor issues are so difficult. Yes, we still have the vendor forum, and technically that's the only place to put a vendor review, although the Vendor's Forums themselves can be used for I believe whatever you want as long as it doesn't in other ways violate the ROC.

And I find it almost funny the way Max was treated.... I mean, he's an awesome moderator in his own right, and I know he puts a lot of thought into not causing trouble.
 
Yea I think this got a little side-tracked.

I posed about an experience I had with a forum vendor. Since the wheels were cheap I didn't really care too much about it which is something that I mentioned (and I had them put on after inspecting the damage at the tire place).

I was threatened with sayings like "I have no problem banning you". And I wanted to share with you all that my experience here as a mod and as a member has been far more positive :)That is all...

I understand that the vendor could use a chance to get it right. But this doesn't change the fact that he got it wrong the first time. Facts are facts. Sorry but if someone claims that they do so much business that they don't inspect the wheels before they ship them out that sounds like a BAD business practice to me, and I was all within my rights as a customer to post about it, whether the mods agreed with that or not.
 
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Since one of the things my company does is develop community and forum software for Fortune 500's and hobbyists alike, I have a sufficient amount of experience in this area, especially forums. ;) I see all too often people quick to jump the gun and use a public medium (in this case, a forum) to voice their outrage and sometimes even use that as leverage to get what they want. From my experience, more often than not, there's a logical explanation and the situation didn't need to go public. The original posters usually feels regret after the adrenaline rush subsides and he/she returns to a sensible state.

I don't think that's the case here, Max... you seem quite reasonable and well intended. I do, however, always suggest contacting the vendor directly prior to "going public." You really didn't get terribly specific. Were these new wheels? Were they drop shipped perhaps? Maybe the vendor never even saw them. Maybe their quality control guy was having an off day and it slipped through. Certainly not an excuse, but it hardly seems worth risking the reputation of an entire vendor on something that may have been reasonably outside their realm of control and even a one-off incident. As frustrating as it is to feel taken advantage of, having been on both sides, I don't recommend tarnishing the reputation of someone / some entity without all of the facts, which I don't think you couldn't have had if you didn't contact them.

As we also have a datacenter and do large volumes of hosting, we receive, on a daily basis, dozens, sometimes hundreds of complaints about sites we host. Copyright infringements, libel (known internally as "they're saying mean things about me" letters) etc. 9 times out of 10, they've not even bothered to contact the site operator who often isn't even aware of the situation. It just makes it more difficult for everyone to not follow a reasonable chain of events. :)

As far as the other forum is concerned. I do agree with you there, based on what you've said. Very tacky moderation, for sure. A good moderator assesses and diffuses a situation while not letting his/her personal feelings enter into it. A good moderator also enforces community guidelines while maintaining proper and professional communication as needed. I wouldn't classify name calling as proper communication. :)

I'm happy it worked out for you and you were able to get a partial refund. I can deal with poor experiences like this (and let's face it, poor experiences have become commonplace) provided someone makes it right without a fight -- which seems to be the case here!
 
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