ShipWire ShipWire.com bait and switch, unfair business practices Sunnyvale California

We signed up because we needed a service that would allow us to fully automate our sales funnel. In particular, we needed cheap storage and to outsource packing and shipping our products. Having mastered the art of SEO, ShipWire is the only company you will find for several pages, and it's a shame we didn't keep digging, because what happened to us was, basically catastrophic.

We signed up because we could quickly and easily setup an account, define products, give them a credit card for automatic monthly billing, connect it to our PayPal account to ship out orders as they come in, and then ship them our inventory. All for $24.95/mo. since the amount of merchandise we were shipping was less than a certain amount of space taken up as advertised as being what they would store at that rate.

We would never log into ShipWire.com again unless it was either to send more inventory to their warehouse, make changes to existing products, or investigate some sort of a shipping issue. Every company we have ever done business with does the same thing if there is a problem with charging our account (like if a credit card expiration date has passed), which is either call, write or email the contact information you give them when you create an account to ask that the bill be settled somehow. They may also leave you a message in your account on their website, for you, but, you will be notified via e-mail at the very least, if not also by phone or, in the increasingly rare case, by postal mail.

Indeed, we hadn't logged into the account in months because not only did we have no need to make any changes to our account or resolve any ordering issues, we never received any email or phone calls telling us things like they have considered our account to be abandoned. Or, they haven't received a payment from us recently. Or, if you don't reactivate your account, send us a payment, or otherwise contact us, we will take the $3,500 worth of retail merchandise in our warehouse and destroy it.

One day, we did happen to log in, because we needed to confirm the amount of inventory in stock for an upcoming sales campaign only to discover several horrifying anomalies. First of all, we had an unexplained balance of nearly $1,500! At the rate we signed up for, that would suggest we hadn't made a payment in over five years! We had only been a customer for less than two years at this point. I contacted our financial institutions and none of them could find any records of any declined charges being made by ShipWire. We also checked every page to look for a message, a banner, an icon or some other kind of notification that might explain this bizarre anomaly. Due to the absolute lack of any reasonable explanation on the website, we could only believe that there was some kind of terrible accident involving the database that supports their website.

Because not only was there this balance that made no sense to us, there was also apparently less than 10 items of our merchandise in stock. We e-mailed ShipWire demanding an explanation but we also reviewed the Terms of Services Agreement and other fine print on the website to see what might be going on here.

As for the $1,500 balance, apparently, ShipWire reserves the right to wait some indeterminate amount of time to eventually increase your monthly bill by about 2,000% without notice. As bad as that is, it still didn't explain why it showed they didn't get a payment for three months when they had billed my credit card at the appropriate $24.95 just one month before the account was marked as "abandoned." There is also a cryptic definition given for an abandoned account. Ultimately, it is considered "abandoned" if they try to contact you but after several attempts, you don't respond.

This takes me to the third and final point which is that they officially consider you "notified" if they leave a message for you on their website. This message never results in an email to you (as it does in the case of other companies, like your bank for example). Indeeded, we never received one phone call, one email, or one letter in the mail from ShipWire that we would have nearly $4,000 worth of merchandise destroyed unless we respond. We would have closed our account and demanded an immediate return of our inventory, shipped at their expense.

After weeks of emailing, failed attempts at setting up a phone call (for what purpose remains unclear) until eventually, some rep confirmed all of this. Interestingly enough, there were no messages left anywhere on their website for us to check at any point in time. But even if there was, the point is, we were never given a fair opportunity to rescue thousands of dollars worth of merchandise.