bigcol wrote:Stay well clear of uksaltwaterflies.
I used them twice and both times a nightmare.Half the order arrived and when i contacted him I was fobbed off with ridicules responses ranging from he has a new server to my sight must be going.3 months after the original order I am a awaiting my card statement as I was assured he would credit me back for the items. Terrible customer service.
I have never had a worse online ordering experience!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
First let me say thanks to the customer who was kind enough to point this thread out to me and also to those customers that have had been kind enough to reccomend uksaltwaterflies within this post.
BigCol Im not too sure who you are , thats the problem with these nicknames on forums. It doesnt make ones day to see such comments. However I fully appreciate that it looks like you have had a bad experience using my business . Heres a little background information on what uksaltwaterflies is , how started it and where we are now . I say we , thats stretching it somewhat. I work full time and Steve works for me part time .
I launched the website in 2005 this was from home in the spare bedroom. I had a baby around my feet half of the time while my good lady went out to work. The site was very crude and basic. We did not take credit card payments in the early stages. Just Pay PAl ! Over the course of the next 3 years the business grew up . The service was excellent, as good as it could get. I had plenty of free time to care for every need, spend hours on the phone with customers. As the business started to grow the process of staying on top of stock and orders became harder to manage. I realised that I would have to invest in better tecnology to make this job less labour intensive. The number of back order items was constantly building up. Tescos run out of stock on products every day of the week. The diffence being they have the tecnology to handle stock.
A welcome spin off from the business was the hosted fishing trips and guiding in Cornwall. Between the two I was out of the country or on the water for around 120 days in 2008. By this stage Steve was working part time , he takes care of processing online orders.
In Feb / March 2009 we finally launched the database driven website. We had various teething problems , servers went down , information went missing. This coincided with our biggest month on record. Things were rather messy in spring of 2009 as we changed the whole operating system.
Once again Im sorry that you had a bad experience I am also proud to say that I get it right most of the time. I still spend a great deal of time taking care of customers, chatting with them, offering advise when needed. I offer a niche service , you wont find the same passion for saltwaterfly fishing and specialist advise elsewhere. As a small business we do have weakness's I would like to think that these are couterbalanced.
The gremlins and server issues are now in the past. The database driven website manages stock really well. If its out of stock it vanishes from the website, when we re stock it re appears. Back orders are pretty much non existant now. I have just returned from 2 weeks fishing abroad to find no problems , no back orders. Automation has made that possible.
Thanks
AG