Here are My Complaints About Vitacost
I have several complaints about Vitacost, but overall they are the best for online holistic, all natural products. Their customer service is much better now in 2016/2017 than it was back when I first posted this, although I have gotten one manager there who still gives me attitude whenever I speak to him.
I think it’s because Kroeger bought them out.
They do have the best prices, and they send out lots of coupon or promo codes, BUT I’ve had complaints about Vitacost almost every time I contact support. Only once or twice I don’t remember having some sort of issue with them.
Here are my complaints about Vitacost:
- I get misinformation from first level staff.
- When I get a supervisor, only one seemed sincerely apologetic for what I encountered. The rest seem like, “oh well, how can I help you.” No apology, no deep sincerity in their voice, etc.
- Yesterday I typed in my e-mail address to their live chat and then the girl asks me again for my e-mail address. I told her I already typed it in, she said it never showed up. I HATE having to redo things because a company can’t get it right the first time. It’s not just Vitacost, there are many companies that require your account number or phone number punched into their IVR, you get a live human and then they ask you to give it to them all over again. It’s a HUGE problem across the board, but I’m only talking about Vitacost now, not other companies.
- After I got off of live chat with Crystal S., I phoned because I wasn’t going to waste my time. The girl I spoke to tried to blame me for the live chat issues saying something like, “no one else has complained, you are the ONLY person, maybe there’s something wrong with your computer.”
LOL, nothing will piss me off MORE than a company trying to blame me for their ineptness.
- I asked to speak to a manager and I got Will. Will is so so.
Will’s basic attitude, in my opinion, is that he doesn’t care about the problems with the Live Chat or the problems I had with girl who transferred me to him, he just wants to get down to why I called in the first place.
While he did apologize, I had to pull the apology out of him.
Another problem with a lot of companies these days, is the staff doesn’t care about fixing problems. Let’s just sweep them under the rug and ignore them so the next customer also has to suffer.
- Then I give him my e-mail address and he can’t find me in the system LOL Ok, this is really starting to get on my nerves, nothing seems to ever go right with Vitacost. I remember the very first time I tried to order from them, I couldn’t. Their site wouldn’t work. Turns out they couldn’t handle the load from all their customers, so I wasted hours and days of my time trying to access their site every 20-30 minutes. It would start to work, then stop working. I also remember trying to call and being on hold for almost an hour or longer.
- Once Will found me in the system via my last name and zip code, I had to make him log out and figure out why he couldn’t find me via my e-mail address. Turns out their search query is case sensitive and he had been using a capped “M” for my e-mail address when I guess they entered it in as lower case. While case sensitive matters for things like passwords, you should NOT use that for a simple e-mail address. This tells me they hired terrible programmers to do their website.
- Then after asking, Will tells me he can’t e-mail me my tracking number. He says I should have gotten an e-mail when it shipped out earlier that day, but of course I didn’t receive any e-mail.
- Then I started discussing candles with him. He was getting one set of candle search results and I was getting less results in my search query. This went on for several minutes while he tried to suggest it was my browser. He didn’t want to stay on the phone with me and figure out the problem (SMART), but I insisted we get to the bottom of it. My gawd, it was like pulling teeth.
Turns out HE was the problem. He had something added to his search results so it showed more items than mine.
Then after talking to him for a minute trying to tell him that candles were missing from the search results, I figured out he isn’t knowledgeable at all when it comes to how search queries work.
So, I was getting very frustrated. He couldn’t think logically and I had to repeat myself over and over again since what he was saying made no sense. His pat answer that he kept repeating to me was getting me pissed.
Companies these days will promote ANYONE to a supervisor!
What happened was yesterday I had searched for soy candles and a slew of results showed up. Today when I just searched for just the word “candles,” NONE of yesterday’s search results showed up. He kept saying their search is very sensitive LOL. It’s not sensitive, whoever coded it doesn’t know what the hell they are doing.
Obviously if you search a broad range of something it should include the same results as the narrower search if it has the same keyword.
Not once did he seem upset by the problems or say he would talk to his engineering or development team about it. I had to tell him that it sounds like you don’t care about fixing the problem. That’s when he said yeh, I’ll send it over, but based on his tone, it was clear he didn’t care at all. Oh and he also told me they always have problems with their site. LOL OF COURSE YOU DO, because you hired some idiot to code your application, and you aren’t smart enough to figure out that you have to fire him and start over from scratch.
I also had to point out that it’s not only frustrating me because I can’t find what I’m searching for even though I found it yesterday, BUT they are losing money. Obviously if items are not being displayed to a potential customer, they will buy less. That’s only logical, but it takes people with brains to figure this out.
I’ve pretty well come to the conclusion that the people over there at Vitacost aren’t very smart, so the owner must not be. It’s a known fact that if the staff are mean, or unintelligent, so is the owner.
Employers always hire people just like them.
A smart person who cares about more than just money, won’t hire people who don’t care about their company and just tries to get the customer off the phone whenever there’s a problem. I’ve had this same feeling every time I’ve called Vitacost with the exception of one manager who I assume doesn’t even work there anymore. High quality workers won’t stay at a company that is totally mismanaged and doesn’t care.
And when searching for information on Vitacost, I saw how the employees rated their CEO Jeff Horowitz. He got around a 6/10. I guess their employees also have complaints about Vitacost.
Based on all of my complaints about Vitacost, I feel the reason they are still around is clearly because of their low prices and coupons, NOT because they are a well-run company. I’m sure they’ve lost tons of customers who would rather pay a little bit more and get quality service and not have their time being wasted by incompetence.
Later last night after I wrote the majority of this post, guess what arrived in my inbox??? The tracking e-mail and proof of my order. The one Will said had already gone out at least 8-10 hours earlier, the one he couldn’t have their system send to me again.
Now I have to call and find out why there’s 2 tracking numbers. I was told there was only ONE package. I won’t be happy if there are two, as it will cost me more in the end.
Michelle
When reviewing other complaint sites, I found that others who also have complaints about Vitacost, and they usually revolve around their staff which is exactly what MY issue is.
So my complaints about Vitacost continue…
1. I’m living overseas right now and I started to have issues with what I could buy about 6 months ago.
They claimed that Burts Bees wouldn’t let their products go overseas even though I DID buy them from Vitacost about 2 years ago.
I wasted so much of my time (about 3 weeks) going back and forth between Burts Bees and Vitacost. Burts Bees is also a sub part company when it comes to caring about their customers.
In regards to the Burts Bees issue, the Vitacost manager Garret didn’t even bother to call me back 2-3 times, and of course, I received no apology.
Janet Defour from the International department was very nice the first time I spoke to her, but the next several times I never received return phone calls and when I did finally speak to her a few months later, she was very cold to me.
Garret has been a problem EVERY time I’ve spoken to him.
Like Will in my examples above, if he apologizes, he doesn’t mean it, he’s not even someone who’s a good faker, although I don’t believe they even bother to try and fake it, that’s how much disdain they have for their customers.
THEN I had an issue with the stopper on an expensive bottle of Clove oil. It stopped giving me drops and started streaming out.
Then the rubber stopper broke off the top.
I had bought it several months back, so I called to tell them about it.
Had they said they couldn’t refund me, I would have understood, but that’s NOT what happened.
The first level support put me on hold to ask his manager. He was a sweet kid.
The manager told him to issue me a refund, but the credit card I used was no longer open, so he said he can only give me a credit.
Since I order from Vitacost all the time, I said that’s fine.
I never got an e-mail, but didn’t think anything of it.
When I went to order 2 weeks later, I had issues with the first level girl (Susan) I spoke to. She kept trying to get me to order FIRST and then they would issue me a refund.
NEVER order first before you have a solid arrangement with the company about what they are going to give back to you.
Because my order was so big, I needed help with splitting it to figure out the International shipping costs, because if you go over 3.60 lbs., you are charged more than $10.99 in shipping.
Also, I needed to order an organic spice and it said I had to enter in my zip code because it’s not available in my area.
Well obviously I couldn’t do that because I’m not in the US and I have received that message before while living in the US and a manager fixed the issue for me, so I was pretty sure that wasn’t the issue.
When Susan put me on hold to get a manager, instead of GARRET coming on the phone to talk to me, he just started talking through her claiming the issue is because it can’t be shipped overseas.
I’m like WTH, are you NUTS? He does NOT know what he’s talking about.
I’ve ordered at least 10 spices from Simply Organic before. I even went to Vitacost’s site and added another one of their spices while Susan was still on the phone and had NO problems.
I told her that I wanted Gareth’s manager to call me. Their names are:
Robert, Suzie and Dewon. I remember I’ve received attitude from Dewon in the past as well.
Did I get his manager???
OF COURSE NOT.
I got some voice mail message from Ashley about the spice not being allowed to be shipped outside the country. Yes, sage is illegal overseas LOL
If you are going to give me some BS reason for something, you better be able to back it up with LOGIC.
I had also asked for Janet Defour to call me and I never got a call back from her either. I was also told she was on break and when I called back 40 minutes later, she mysteriously was gone for the day and it wasn’t even close to 5 pm.
I called the next day and spoke to Tamika who is also a manager. She was also a BITCH. Cold, no apology AND 3 times I had to ask her if she’s Gareth’s manager like the other 3, or his co-worker. She REFUSED to tell me and just kept asking me over and over again like a robot, “how can I help you?”
She THEN tells me (get this…) that I DON’T have a credit, that it was rejected.
Now I was REALLY UPSET.
You do NOT tell a customer they are getting a credit when you don’t plan to give it to them and I told her this.
She then lies and tells me it goes through another department.
I have NEVER had any first level support tell me that the refund has to first get approved and when something arrives broken or I don’t like it, I do get a refund.
She said maybe there was a misunderstanding. I said noooo, there wasn’t. I could remember the conversation as if it was yesterday. Why would the CSR tell me they need to put it on my credit card if the refund wasn’t going to go through right away???
If I had had the credit card available, I would have gotten it right away.
Never ONCE did he tell me it would first have to be approved.
And then when I asked her why I wasn’t told it wasn’t approved, she had no answer for me.
She said that credit approval department is no longer there because it’s 4:15 EST (must be nice that they leave early), and that tomorrow they may be closed due to the storm, so Thursday she should get back to me.
It’s now Friday and NO ONE EVER CALLED ME.
I even e-mailed asking for head office to call me and I got one response yesterday and that was it.
No one on Facebook got back to me either.
One common personality trait of ALL their managers is coldness, rudeness, trying to sweep the issue under the rug, etc.
Usually with any OTHER companies, it’s the other way around. The managers are nicer and better to deal with than first level support.
With Vitacost it’s the EXACT opposite.
So it’s been 3 months since I came across this bug and they STILL haven’t fixed it.
I had to write to a manager because I was sick of dealing with the moronic regular customer serivce of Vitacost.
The other manager I was dealing with is gone and they refused to get me a new one telling me to deal with regular customer service and clearly that is too stressful for me.
Here’s what I wrote, although I edited parts of it…
“So back on February 17th I tried to deal with regular CS, but of course as usual they aren’t very sharp over there.
They wanted me to do a recording of me paying for an order when I had already ordered & they knew I just ordered otherwise I wouldn’t have told them I had the same issue I’ve had the last 2 previous times.
So they just signed off with well, let us know if there’s anything more we can help you with INSTEAD of getting to the problem & fixing it.
Anyway, I was just about to order when I remembered that there was probably still an issue with your site. It’s been like this for at least 3 or more months.
Every time I go to order, even though I’m logged in, it forces me to put in my e-mail address & then I have to click on things until it goes through the prompts so it finishes off the order.
It’s very frustrating, time consuming & I shouldn’t have to go through this.
I told them all of this & instead of them just testing it themselves, they wanted me to do their job for them.
Here’s the video, but I better not have any issues with my credit card because I had no choice but to show my CVV, otherwise the order wouldn’t have gone through.”
End of e-mail.
There’s ALWAYS problems with their site. I’ve been complaining about this for years and the minute I found out about them there were issues with their site and that was back in 2013.
They make millions (maybe billions) of dollars per year and their site is still a crappy 90s type site where I have to click on several links to get to a certain spot, and I can’t open links in a new tab so I have to either click on the back button or open another tab and start all over again.
NO ONE has a site like that, but they won’t fix it and I’ve complained about it twice already to the manager who left.
They just don’t CARE!
Kroeger is an evil corp, I know that and I wish I didn’t have to order only from them.
So I didn’t update this after I heard back.
They are doing it on purpose ONLY for people overseas.
Why?
It makes NO LOGICAL SENSE.
So again when ordering I have to jump through hoops.
And here’s more of their stupidity…
Instead of making it so the site tells you to fill out that e-mail field before you press the order button, they make you do it AFTER you press the order button & insert your CVV code.
Then I have to click all over the place on their buttons because none of them work and there’s no rhyme or reason to it.
So a 20 second checkout leads to almost 2 minutes.
I haven’t ordered from Vitacost in a while because when I tried to order last month, they wouldn’t let me order the chocolate bars I order ALL the time (2 different brands), AND they wouldn’t let me order the green tea I order ALL the time.
I e-mailed the international department and I was ignored.
They ignored me after I called to complain & the agent left a message with the international department, and it took regular support FOREVER to respond to my e-mail. They said it was because the chocolate bars are heat sensitive and I said ok, but now it’s not summer.
They are correct, during the summer they probably shouldn’t ship them, but it’s winter now.
They never got back to me ignoring me again.
Then they tried to say that the tea was out of stock, but it wasn’t when I added it to the cart & checked out, & it specifically said they wouldn’t ship it to my country, nothing about it being out of stock.
So either way it’s ANOTHER FUCKING SITE ISSUE from Vitacost.
And here’s MORE site issues with Vitacost from today’s order.
I go to check out and it showed my overseas address.
Because of their BS requirement that I manually type in my e-mail instead of just pulling it from my account, my browser was giving me an option to insert a different e-mail (same domain) and I clicked on that intending to change it once it was in the field.
Well the site moved to the next stage not only NOT letting me change it, but then it deleted my shipping address and entered in my US billing address. WTF???
When I went to change it by choosing it from my address book, it had COMPLETELY DELETED MY OVERSEAS e-mail from my account, so I had to MANUALLY type everything in again and AGAIN say it’s my default shipping address.
AND they had also deleted one of my credit cards so I had to enter that in AGAIN.
I HATE VITACOST’S SITE AND IT’S BEEN THIS WAY FOR 7 YEARS.
Their programmers and website designers are TERRIBLE and it doesn’t matter how often I complain, they don’t give a shit.