*sigh*

It’s actually with a heavy heart that I feel the need to make this post. It’s not often customer service is so bad I want to warn people away from a company, but this time I think I should.

I am talking about a company called Sprinkle Twinkle Ltd sometimes known as Sprinkle Twinkle 24 (online).

*****11/05/2019 UPDATE. The links for Sprinkle Twinkle no longer work because the company went bust in 2017/2018. Apparently they are now running a care business. A lot of people were left with orders and refunds owing, apparently they stopped responding to people entirely shortly before going bust. Their facebook page is covered in bad reviews and irate customers, they didn't even delete it when it went out of business, not a surprise.*****

I can’t say they were ever anything other than polite with me, they were always quite quick to reply but if I tell you that I placed an order on the 24^th March, and after a long chain of emails they still couldn’t provide me with a eta on my order by the 1^st June. 68 days later!

I believe they have changed some of the policies since I ordered, but even though items appear to be in stock they actually are not, they wait for a group of orders to come in and then they place their order with the supplier in America. I only know they do this because of an order I placed with them at the end of last year that took 3 months to arrive because of “customs issues” and the delay in placing the original order. Basically they had waited a long time to place the order due to the Christmas rush and them relocating their company and then it was further delayed by customs, so a 3 month wait. I didn’t think this was the normal amount of time it took to get things from them; I thought it was a one off!

I place my order two months in advance of when I needed it. As I shared with them via email, this was because I was working out it would take 4 weeks for them to place order, 5 days for the American Supplier to post, 3 weeks for customs to hold things up, 2 days for the item to be posted to me. Two months seemed like plenty of time to get things done. It takes less than that amount of time to order from Supermart USA and Chinese suppliers via ebay.

In their initial update to the order they themselves state:

Due to the volume that we order we would expect a worse case scenario to be around 3 weeks from your order date. We do now order on a weekly basis from the larger suppliers and this should cut down waiting times on delivery to our customers however there can be cases where our suppliers cannot complete every order due to them not having stock in to supply us, in this situation we will make you aware as soon as we know.

So they were actually predicting a date far sooner than I had imagined when I placed the order.

On the 2^nd of June after emails saying there was still no eta I cancelled the order, and on the 6^th of June they eventually refunded me. They didn’t bother to follow that up with another email, or reply to the email I had made asking them to cancel, or the one chasing the cancellation when they still hadn’t refunded me a few days later.

So yes, I got refunded in the end, but I think the reason I still couldn’t get an eta was because the items had still not been ordered. They discouraged me from contacting Lawn Fawn (who I assumed were the supplier for the goods) because they said goods were not coming from them, but actually I think it was because I would have discovered the order hadn’t been placed, or hadn’t been placed 2 months ago, but recently.

The co-owner of the company did ring me personally and left a short sharp message on my answer phone, at the time I was hoping it was going to be an apology and an eta for my order, but after an email later I actually think he was ringing because he was cross that I had offered to ring Lawn Fawn and chase them about the delay.

I am not ordering from them again, and I am actively going to discourage people from using them and to try somewhere else instead. There is no other time when I have to wait longer than 2 months for something I order online, even a sofa would arrive sooner than that. It’s not on, it’s not reasonable to offer no eta when it’s requested and I hope Lawn Fawn realise, the company in the UK representing them and their products is performing so awfully.