Attn: Meritline member (The Conclusion)

[macleod]

tommyoz, its not that we don't believe you. I am sure that everything you said you did, you did. The part that I believe that you are missing (specifically the part where I was talking about your user name and order number) in what I am saying is that the member meritline does not know who "tommyoz" is in relation to the person (your real name) when you sent in your order (on this forum).

From what I reviewed of yours and his post, you did have to "call meritline out" in order to get some type of response. Coincidence? who knows, but the point that I am making is that on the posts so far, you have not told them. My name is bob jones, my order number is 123456789. Here is a detailed list of the things that I did (times, etc.). You may have sent that info to them at this point. To really get it out in the open, screen shot all of your information (cross out names and cc#'s,etc) and throw it on here.

I can understand your frustration, however, I dont think that meitline the company is out to get you (meaning, they probably aren't electing not to return peoples' calls per se, just with the season being where it is and probably a number of other factors which the meritline member talked to a little), they at least at this point are going to rectify the situation.

Personally, I agree at what you have done on this post from a concept standpoint. I have a similar post with the shop4tech folks. From what I remember of the post, shop4 tech was messing with someone, I had recently done business with shop4tech and there was a contradiction with the price or something from what they advertised and what the final amount was or something(I cant remember). What i did was jump on a chat with shop4tech, let them know that I have posted my beginning experience on the forum and that I would be reporting back exactly what was said in the chat, etc. Me personally, I would have toned down the way I wrote it, but thats me .

I guess that I can see meritlines point because I work in the technology field supporting a call center and collection group. I review customer correspondence from all of our contact points (web, IVR, etc.) and we receive correspondence like yours that basically has a "someone's out to get me" tone. I try to rationalize it with facts (usually someone will say they have been waiting in our IVR for 15 minutes when it is actually 2 minutes and it is the day after thanksgiving or something).

I am also a customer and can understand that this isnt about them, it IS about you. You bought what you bought in good faith. You paid your money for X product, was told that it will be here by X and you planned for that for whatever reason. Now, you find out that that isnt going to happen and its too late to order from someone else. Communications appear to go ignored (remember the days before voicemail and email and faxes) because it has been X period of time. It pisses you off and I can understand that.

I guess the short answer here is that you got their attention, they are going to make amends. We'll all see how standup meritline is at this point and see if they take the necessary action(s) to keep this from happening in the future. I (and others) are interested in seeing how this plays out. Personally, I hope that Meritline honors what they have said and you report back that not only have you been credited they also sent y'all a 25 meida pack or something to say they are sorry for this incident.

[adam]

I will say this one more time I HAVE TRIED TO SOLVE THIS OFFLINE AND DIDN'T GET ANYWHERE. WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST I DO?

I suggest you give them your order number. This forum is not Meritline's customer support mechanism. We get too many posts like this. If you are unhappy with Meritline's service and want to let it be known to other potential customers, a post on this forum is a perfect venue. But if you are going to try and use this forum as a means to effect service from the company than please don't drag it out. If you truly just want your money back then give them the number, because anything that helps them address your problem ultimately helps you. Witholding information doesn't prove anything and it will only slow the process.

If you have a grievance with Meritline than handle it professionally. Contact the better business bureau and file a complaint.

[pauln119]

Quick comment to Tommyoz's point...

Companies really should not charge your credit card before they are ready to ship. They can get an authorization for the amount from the credit card company to validate your credit card, but it won't be an actual charge. When they are ready to ship, then they can charge the credit card. Enough said.

what are you talking about? they charge your credit card first to see if it is a valid card or not. if they shipped everyone's order before they charged the card, everyone could use a fake card and meritline could do nothing about it because they already shipped the order.

[LanEvo7]

I thought it was against Visa / Mastercard policy to charge a credit card before verifing that the item is ready to ship.

[Lobe]

I *think* VISA/MC requires the merchant to ship the merchandise within 30-days of charging your card.
Weird I ordered some Maxell discs from Meritline 7-8 months ago they charged my card, but never shipped them...? curiously enough, they did send me some generic junk media that I did not order-not Maxell. That is FRAUD. So Meritline when will we get the Maxell media we paid for?

Meritline is evil scum!
EVIL!!!!!!!

ah, I'm so glad I found RIMA.COM, many thanks to others here.

[sitlet]

They can get an authorization for the amount from the credit card company to validate your credit card, but it won't be an actual charge. When they are ready to ship, then they can charge the credit card.

yes, but how many compaines actually do that. i order stuff online all the time, and i have not encountered one company that does that. im not saying you're wrong, but i have just never seen anyplace that does that. when you order off ebay, you send the seller your payment by paypal, then they ship your order.

[LanEvo7]

Ebay isn't a merchant though, so things work differently

From all the companies I've ordered from they've always had the stuff in stock and its usually shipped the same day or the next day. Also just because many companies break that rule doesn't mean its ok, it just means some companies are more honest than others.

[DatMuthapucka]

I am glad that people post the problems they encounter. It is very informative and helps me avoid such service. This is certainly not the only post i have seen concerning Meritline. The other complaints are simular, their shipments do not come through, and Meritline is misleading and unhelpful.

A majority of people who order media online visit dvdrhelp.com, and those that do not, just pick up a pack at the local store. People will see these posts, and if Meritline does not do the right thing, they risk seeing a decrease in sales very soon.

I have never ordered from Meritline, nor will i ever because of numerous reports of bad service. There are many other companies to choose from.

Newegg has great customer service , fedex confirms my shipment within a day, order status is fast, accurate, and informative. I have not tried rima yet, but from the likes of it i will soon.

my 2 cents

[stangyamahar1]

I too have had bad experiences with meritline. I would recommend to everyone not to use them. My experiences.

first order- 200 riteks----good
second order- 200 riteks inkjet printables----all bad (that i tested), took almost three weeks to arrive, tried to cancel order after about a week and they would not respond to my calls. I spoke to them on the phone and they took my name, number, etc. and promised to return my call, never did. I finally sent them an email saying i was filing a complaint with my credit card company and reporting them for fraud, and what do you know, they ship it that day and send me a tracking number, (THIS IS AFTER ALMOST 3 Weeks!) Even though they charged my card within a day of ordering.

They are very shady to do business with. I have had success, but overall very poor service. I would not recommend them to anyone.

I think the person on here posting from meritline is just damage control. He/She has no real control over the operations and is merely trying to keep us optomistic about purchasing from meritline.

I have ordered dozens of times from Newegg and hae spent close to $10,000 with them in the past 2 years. Great service, Super fast shipping, usually have products within 3 days, even with regular shipping.

Plus now that i notice they sell riteks i will be ordering from them exclusively.

[stangyamahar1]

I too have had bad experiences with meritline. I would recommend to everyone not to use them. My experiences.

first order- 200 riteks----good
second order- 200 riteks inkjet printables----all bad (that i tested), took almost three weeks to arrive, tried to cancel order after about a week and they would not respond to my calls. I spoke to them on the phone and they took my name, number, etc. and promised to return my call, never did. I finally sent them an email saying i was filing a complaint with my credit card company and reporting them for fraud, and what do you know, they ship it that day and send me a tracking number, (THIS IS AFTER ALMOST 3 Weeks!) Even though they charged my card within a day of ordering.

They are very shady to do business with. I have had success, but overall very poor service. I would not recommend them to anyone.

I think the person on here posting from meritline is just damage control. He/She has no real control over the operations and is merely trying to keep us optomistic about purchasing from meritline.

I have ordered dozens of times from Newegg and hae spent close to $10,000 with them in the past 2 years. Great service, Super fast shipping, usually have products within 3 days, even with regular shipping.

Plus now that i notice they sell riteks i will be ordering from them exclusively.

[robrosen]

And by the way, Who are you? a friend of theirs? maybe a co worker?
and how do you know that I didn't supply them with a order # If I was to PM it?

My relationship to Meritline is solely as a satisfied customer. Why am I bothering to post here? My experiences with them have been completely unproblematic, and I just wanted to correct the erroneous impression that every shopping experience with Meritline is a nightmare.

That's assuming the original poster is not a competing vendor hoping to make a dent in Meritline's holiday season. Why would a competing vendor want to smear Meritline? Because this is the best time for such a smear. Retailers can log as much as a 1/5 of the year's business in the one-month period between Thanksgiving and Christmas - for some, this is the only really profitable period of the year, despite the discounting.

[Lobe]

robrosen,
so YOU have had good experiences? So, I would question why you would stand up for a company as sleazy as this that it KNOWN to have sold fake media. Just because they haven't screwed you yet, doesn't mean you should defend their illegal activities.
Unless, of course, you work for Meritline?

They are scum, look at all they have defrauded of their money. You support that?

[Faustus]

I feel the need to add here that other then sometimes having to email them for my tracking numbers, that I've ordered a few times from Meritline and never had an issue with them.

That aside I hope everyone gets their problems worked out.

[rgtaa]

i think the orginal poster seems childish because when the Meritine Member wrote on this thread said he would help ... I believed him!
All you had to do was PM him your info and I bet he would have straightened it out super fast!
But that was not the intention of the first poster ... he was frustrated and just wanted to vent and he did.
I had no problems with this company either.
I made the mistake of reversing one of the zip code numbers and they were trying to be helpful when I informed of this.
I got my G4's as expected.
Now if after giving the Meritine Member a fair chance to fix the problem and he didn't , then I would complain again! but i would have given him a fair chance to look into this matter and then give BOTH sides of this transaction. We really are hearing only HIS side , and maybe that was the reason he didn't want to give the info .... because the Meritine Member would present their side!

[MikeV]

Tommyoz wrote:

I just checked the status again on the tracking # with UPS and it still says "Billing Information Received" since December 5th. No emails of any kind.

I also had a package (from another company) that showed "Billing information Received" on the UPS site. It had been that way for 10 days. I decided that day to call the company to find out the status of my order. Since the phone # and account info was at home I had to wait until after work to call them. Guess what, when I got home the package was sitting on my door step. It was not the companys fault. UPS did not update the status on the shipment.

[robrosen]

so YOU have had good experiences? So, I would question why you would stand up for a company as sleazy as this that it KNOWN to have sold fake media.

The fake Maxell media was sold at a price similar to that of generic media. I bought it, tried it, found that it was problematic for DVD-Video and used it for data only - where I had no problems using it in a variety of computer DVD drives.

But Meritline wasn't the only vendor selling this - a number of other companies also did so. I can understand why - Meritline, like other online vendors, is in the business of selling off-brand media, some of which may be overruns from commercial users buying in bulk, who then resell the excess to retailers at wholesale prices. I suspect Meritline was given false assurances about the provenance of the media.

Just because they haven't screwed you yet, doesn't mean you should defend their illegal activities.

Selling fake products without any prior knowledge of their counterfeit nature is illegal, but large corporations have done the same. Fakes are so good these days, that it is impossible to tell them apart from the real thing, even for large and sophisticated buyers like Walmart and Target. To my knowledge, Meritline had no problem processing refunds once it became known that the Maxell media were fake. Meritline also stopped selling the media under the Maxell name.

Unless, of course, you work for Meritline?

At the risk of repeating myself, I don't work for Meritline. The completely grammatical English sentences I have typed out should be testimony to that. (No offense to Meritline, but their staff are clearly non-native speakers of English - not that it matters - they're selling media, not writing speeches, and they're good where it counts - competitive prices, compatible media and reliable delivery).

[musher70]

I too, have been burnt by meritline...

They show you a pic of one disc, then
send another, WTF is up with that...

I dont care about ritek this and ritek
that, are you gonna waste your life,
trying to figure out which oem disc
you have???

Gonna do a speed test on every disc
you make? Who cares anyway...

But when you buy something, dont care
what it is, you expect to get what the box
says....so i dont buy discs online anymore
tnx for post...

[Lobe]

Meritline continued selling the fake Maxell media well after they knew it was fake(assuming they didn't know from the beginning-yeah right)
Anyway, they gives them the chance to prove themselves, so what did they do then when they found out it was fake? ah...there you go NOTHING!!! Did not inform anyone they may have been shipped an inferior product instead of what they were sold. I use these for important archives so I ONLY buy Made in Japan media for this, I buy Ritek for less important stuff.
Anyway, Meritline DID NOTHING, when contacted they would not replace it with a product equal to what was advertised. They would NOT give a refund..."send them back and we'll give you credit for the ones you return"

Again, well after they knew they were fake the only respone from them was "well, what was wrong with them?" They did not care that it wasn't what I paid at all.
These guys are SCUM!!!!!
That is NOT how you handle a situation whether you knowingly or not misrepresented a product.

you are a sucker, you were ripped off by them, and still patronize them? wtf? you're admitting you're that stupid? i don't get it. really? THAT stupid?
They're are plenty of great legitimate sources for media out there, stop bending over for Meritline.

[Regal]

Hi,

I just orderd some Ritek dvd-r's 4x from Meritline. I will let you all know how there service is, delivery and all.

[phinsman]

I for one have had good experiences with Meritline, certainly better than buying discs on eBay (yikes) and allmediaoutlet.com, supermediastore, or whatever it's called, etc.

As far as newegg goes, I didn't realize they sold DVD media, and I can't believe I didn't know.

I've bought a lot of computer hardware from Newegg, including motherboards, memory, USB pen drives, hard drives, etc., probably around 15 orders, and I will attest that they are by far, BY FAR, the BEST online store I have ever dealt with.

I live on the East Coast, and every order I have placed with them except one has arrived in two days. The exception arrived in three days. And that's not like I'm paying extra for shipping either...many times the shipping is free, and almost always $5 or less. Plus you can get a lot of freebies...I've gotten a couple of nice pens from them as well as a hat that I'll probably never wear.

The cool thing is that they ship Fed Ex and it's still cheap. Not Fed Ex Ground either, but Fed Ex Express. It's fast and the tracking is updated so much faster than UPS.

Well...I didn't mean to sound like I work for their ad agency, but I would definitely recommend them.

Dale

[lordsmurf]

I've had no problems with Meritline, just a little slower sometimes than RIMA, but not by much. Great company as far as I am concerned.

Everybody was burned by fake MXL. They only took it down after they confirmed it was fake, not from customer advice that assumed it was.

[LanEvo7]

They didn't take it down, they just renamed it and sold it as "True 2x" even thought most people had issues burning it at any speed.

[Tom81]

Wait a second here, if anyone wants to see Meritline's customer service in action go to there online support forums (check the date of my post here)...you will find many questions that have been lingering there for weeks unanswered by Meritline support, just ignored....and these are not personal responses , but responses that the entire public could learn from.
I said check the date of this post, because when Meritline sees someone shined the light on them, they are probably going to rush to answer all those questions that they basically ignored previously.

[ttek1229]

I Have also have a problem with meritline... I will nerver do business again with them.. My story isn't as bad as some others, but I think it still merits typing... I purchased some of the matrix +R media... I know, it's cheap but is advertised as 4x .... Took a long time to get it too... Now not a single one will burn at 4X.. I can't even try... The media is actually 2.4X media.. there is no 4X write descriptor in the media ID .... I spent many emails with customer service.. tried the forums on meritline's site.. I didn't even get a response until I posted in the pre-sale forum... Then I got a response, I guess they were just ingoring me until it looked like I might actually affect a future sale or 2.. the response was from william, and was real weak in my eye.. after many exchanges he offered a 15$ refund.. I posted back to send some 4x media instead, then he private messaged me to tell me it was only a 5$ refund instead..He said he read my order wrong... I posted that in the public forum, and he was not happy... Seemed to like the idea that everyone thought he gave me 15$ back instead of 5....I know this isn't horrible, but it's downright fraud.... They sold the media as 4X when my burner, and 2 others , plus others posted there all agree that it's only 2.4 X media.... If you have a burner that doesn't read and set the burn speed according to the media ID(write descriptor available) then you could probably burn at 4X... Kinda like overclocking a computer... You might be able to do it, but can you sell it legally advertising it as a faster computer???? I don't think so.. So in my eyes selling the matrix media as 4X(It's still on there site as 4X) is illegal,especially since there is no write descriptor for 4X anywhere in the media code..by the way I posted on that site as bobo... Look it up if you think I am making this up as some kind of anti meritline company.. I do have my order number posted in 2 different forums over there...

[CoolRain]

i am sorry to say we had some issue with meritline either. they have the worse customer service we have ever seen (really want to tell them to train their employee, but no one to tell to). i say try ekatomi.com, they are new, seems ok. Or try Rima, they are slow but worked out without any problem with me. About new egg, i don't think they are any different from meritline cause still today i am still fighting for my last order and their defective rate is too much of headache.

[DiablosuX102]

ok, earlier in this thread i said that i had just ordered some g04's from meritline, today they just came in (9 days later) the whole time it said "will ship in 2-3 days" but i got them, and also got a free cd case i didn't buy. so i'm not too angry at them

josh

[500AX]

I bought from Meritline before and they were good, but with all these complains now, I think they are just getting too big and management just don't know how to run a company any more.

[Suga-Sam]

I just want to say I just read this thread today.
I am sure Tommyoz has gotten his credit by now. But I must say if you still look at this thread tommy that your original post was good and did what it should but all subsequent post by you after meritline replied (to use the same format/yelling you did )WHERE EXTREEMLY CHILDISH AND GUIDED BY FRUSTRATION. AND COUNTER productive. You are very silly expect that the poster knew or cared who you where. That person was just doing his/her job.
If you bother to do some very simple research you will see that Meritline, livewherehouse and a few other simular stores using the yahoo store front are all just iterations of 1 larger company.
So unless you provide them with an order number they have no idea what you are talking about.
If you have not recieved your credit just be an adult and contact them again with your order#

poor baby

[Savant]

I just wanted to add my 2 cents... I've placed about 10 orders with Meritline over the past two years, and I haven't had any real problems. The only issue I had once was an order of BeALLs that I wasn't happy with the quality on, so I returned them, received a credit, and then ordered a different replacement. Otherwise everything I have ordered has been received quickly and without incident.

I don't order from them any more, but that is because they only use UPS Express shipping to Canada, and it's just too expensive. Should they decide to offer a USPS option in future I would definately consider buying from them again.

Regards,

Savant

[BJ_M]

as with Savant - we have placed many orders with them for shipment to canada and never had any problems at all ... if fact , really fast service is the norm ..
since many on-line companies will not ship to canada or you have to jump through major hoops and/or excess service charges ... its refreshing to deal with a company that will ship to canada (though they check credit card data with more detail than usa orders - but nothing overly hard to comply with) as a normal course of bussness..

now i can understand the frustration when an order gets royaly screwed up-- and im sure that just about every online company has more than a few horror tales ...

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller1331.html is a good place to rate a merchant .... (any online merchant) ...data there shows they are slipping in last 3 months ... showing that possably sales are going through the roof and service and order fullfillment are not keeping up ... which could indicate time to hire more people ..

yahoo ratings have very good for meritline (see link below) - but i tend see that they are always better than reseller ratings (above)....

http://shopping.yahoo.com/merchrating/user_rv.html?merchant_id=1002354&__yltc=s:235013...slk:readreview