Ocean Star International UNclear, UNcommunicative, UNprofessional, UNtrustworthy, End Result - 40% Higher Than Quote Coral Springs, Florida

My shipment was 40% higher than the quote!!! 40%!!!

I will never use Ocean Star again!!!

They are poor, ambiguous communicators when it comes to making a customer feel secure about their shipment!!

Whether they do it on purpose or not, they provide false, misleading quotes and should be dealt with very skeptically.

Ocean Star, thanks for wasting my time!!!

If you'd like to know the story, here it is. Having read the other posts here, perhaps I am luckier than some of their other customers:

I recently bought an industrial size floor sander through eBay that I wanted picked up in Wisconsin, USA, packed and shipped to my house here in Sendai, Japan via air freight.

The situation with Ocean Star (OSI) started out pretty good. Very friendly salespeople, professional looking web page, excellent quote, and quick response. While these services are always pleasant, business is businees, and business is their weakness.

I was originally quoted a price of $1331 for what is called door-to-door service, which means that Ocean Star organizes for my item to be picked up, packed, air freighted to Japan and dropped off at my house. I thought that the price was very fair and went ahead with the shipment.

A few days later, I got an urgent phone call that the sander had been shipped but that the shipping cost had gone up $638 and that because it had already been shipped I had no choice but to pay. That's an increase of 47%!!!

Why did it go up? From the beginning they told me that the sander needed to be packed on a pallet but for some reason they didn't take the pallet size into consideration. They then blamed the express freight company saying that they had to repack it to make it more stable (BIG LIE I found out later) for air freight and that the dimensions went up. Basically, I had to pay for a 70% empty pallet. I wasn't satisfied with the reasons they provided me as to why they couldn't have told me about the increase beforehand so I immediately started to look into the situation on my own.  I wasn't sure any more if they had even picked up my sander as they we're not willing to give me a tracking number, air waybill or much other information that I could verify. Sketchy!

I contacted the moving company that picked up and packed my sander directly as well as the actual express freight company shipping my sander to find out what the deal with these new dimensions was all about. As it turns out, Ocean Star should have known all along the final dimensions of my shipment. The freight company told me that they had not, as Ocean Star claimed, repacked my shipment at all. Ocean Star lied! Now either Ocean Star also lied to me about not knowing the dimensions until the sander had been shipped or they didn't bother looking into my order very carefully in the first place. Either way, it did go up 47% and I don't know how a supposedly professional company could overlook such a major detail. To their credit, they did apologize and offer $100 discount on the shipment. Although I found this amount unacceptably low, I was worried that if I didn't go along with their terms that I wouldn't be seeing my sander at all. I paid the final invoice which was, with the discount included, 40% higher than the quote, at $1870.

The next day, the express freight company contacted me, no thanks to Ocean Star I might add, and gave me a tracking number for my shipment. They also said that they would keep in direct contact with me with regards to the details of my shipment. Now that's professional! My sander got here a couple of days later, which was March 15th,2012.

In the end, the moving company that picked up and packed my sander was very professional. I spoke to them over the phone on several occasions and they answered all my questions very thoroughly, provided me with very specific details and explained things I didn't know about in simple terms. Ocean Star was the opposite.

The freight company located in Japan, contacted their branch in the US, keep in mind a 13-hour time difference, and was also able to give me specific details about my shipment, including the above mentioned tracking number, in a very clear manner and answer all my questions in just 1 day. Why couldn't Ocean Star?

The companies that Ocean Star deals with are indeed professionals but OSI seems to be the weak link in the chain. Their salespeople are a little too good at smooth talking and way too poor at doing business which must include proper communication and making customers feel at ease about their orders by providing sufficient information from start to finish. When it comes to international shipping, people are investing a lot of time, stress, and money so customer satisfaction should come first! Speaking of which I still haven't gotten a receipt for my final payment yet.

The funniest part about all of this is that if Ocean Star had just said to me in the first place my shipment was going to be $1870 I probably would've said OK.

i'm glad this website exists as it's one of the only places where customers can post their complaints without the fear of them being deleted. I just wish I had seen it before I ever dealt with OSI!

To sum it all up:

I'm extremely disappointed with the services offered by Ocean Star.

I will not be using them ever again.

I could never recommend them to anyone else.

I will do my best to let people know what my experience with them has been like.

My final price was 40% more than my quote, they told me after it was too late, they lied, they didn't justify or compensate me enough for THEIR MISTAKE!!!

Hope this helps someone else out there to not make the mistake as I did of dealing with Ocean Star International.