I’m ordering a TON of car parts these days for my spec miata project. In doing so, I occasionally fail to do proper research on online retailers before buying. Recently, I placed an order at Auto Parts Warehouse for some brake calipers without doing any research on them. After all, their web site looks good, so surely they are reputable, no? Well, stupidly, I had forgotten that I used these guys before and found them to be both slow and error prone.
To research online retailers, I typically start my research by doing a search on my favorite search engine with a phrase like “<vendor name> sucks”. More often than not, this will reveal retailers that people feel passionately about (in a negative way).
As an example, searching for “auto parts warehouse sucks” brings up a fair number of complaints. Generally, it seems like the reviews of autopartswarehouse.com are overwhelmingly negative. For an example, just take a look at the opinion of Amazon reviewers. Out of 34 reviews, 28 are of the lowest possible rating! From the search results, you can also see that this particular vendor operates under a number of other web site names including thepartsbin.com and car-stuff.com.
Now my personal experience with AutoPartsWarehouse is primarily that they are slow and that they don’t tell you what the status of your order is. And don’t even waste money paying for overnight shipping because order processing with these guys takes days or even a week to ship. Why pay for overnight service just to make up for bad ordering time.
There is really no excuse for poor customer service in the online shopping world. Excellent vendors are always just a few clicks (and some research) away.
