Leigh Karchner

Review of CTW Home Collections

From a retailer perspective....... don't even both...

From a retailer perspective....... don't even bother! I've been a retailer for this company for the past year and recently fired them for the following reasons: make a lot of mistakes filling orders, their drop-ship program is a joke, shipping costs impossible to obtain prior to shipping. They provide a list of box sizes and weights that are suppose to be for all their active products but apparently isn't not kept current. They use shredded paper to pack their products that makes an incredible mess. While I will give them credit for fast shipping, their shipping methods and handling of merchandise is questionable. In the short time we dealt with CTW, we received merchandise that was neither wrapped correctly nor boxed correctly for shipping. They often use boxes that do not match the size of the content that in turn pads the shipping costs to an exorbitant amount. When an order is drop-shipped, the outrageous shipping costs make it not even profitable to fulfill an order. Reaching someone in Customer Service is a joke! The most recent, and last, experience with them included a drop-shipment where not only was the price of the shipping 3 times the amount it should have been for 2 small items that should have weighed no more than 5 lbs. with the shipping box, they also pulled and packed two other items that were not a part of the order so that a box 3 times the necessary size was used and then charged us $38.39 in shipping costs for a very small order. Not only did this create a bad situation with our customer, because we are ultimately responsible for the actions of CTW, we surely lost a customer due to their incompetence. What bothers me most about this company other than their complete incompetence is their lack of concern for the numerous mistakes and the lack of sincere apology for their actions. After this last incident with pulling the wrong order and over-charging us for shipping, they first refunded half of the shipping costs but only after I complained and then after three days of not seeing the refund, I had to contact them again to find out why. I eventually did get a response for their Customer Service manager, who by all accounts did not appear to really know what was going on, said they were refunding another $6.00 to offset the outrageously large box used (rated at 57 lbs. by weight and dimension) but again, 9 days later, I had to email again to find out why that credit of $6.00 had not been issued. This seems to be the norm of this company: horrible communication or no communication at all, it's very difficult to reach someone when there is an issue, their systems of notifying about when an order ships seems to be totally lacking as I've had shipments just show up without any communication at all from CTW, even after asking about status, and their warehouse appears to be incredibly disorganized and run by people that neither understand about proper packing and shipping technique nor do they have a system for checking that orders are packed and counted properly. I can only imagine the chaos on a day-to-day basis if they have this many issues with filling just my orders over the course of just over 1 year. From the complaints I'm seeing online about this company, these are NOT isolated incidents but are the norm for this company. I have fired this supplier from our product lines and it's really a shame. They have wonderful products that our customers seemed to love but dealing with all the issues with this company not only made it not profitable for us, it was incredibly frustrating to have to apologize to customers constantly on their behalf. If I were to rate this company on a scale from 1 to 10, I would give them a 1 only because their products are very nice. The rest, not so much! Don't waste your time!