Shipwire Unable to get my goods out of there without paying huge charges - customer service nonexistent Palo Alto, California

I signed up with Alex at Shipwire last year when I was looking for a fulfillment company that could meet my needs for multiple international warehousing locations. At first, it all sounded great and Alex was easy to reach and available to answer all my questions.

Once my account was set up and my goods were stored and ready to ship, things changed. I ran into some issues with some of my shipments and had questions on how to resolve them. In shipping, everything is time sensitive. It became clear that Alex was no longer my point person and that I was to go through regular customer service ie. create an online case.

I tried this route and this is what would happen: I would create a case and then wait for a response. Usually the next day I would get an email back from someone named Jeremy saying " We got your email and I will be looking into in the next 24 hours" 24 hours? These were easy questions! Then Jeremy would either call me back or email me and if I missed the call, I would never be able to get him on the phone again as he wouldn't leave a number to call back.

So my simple question would go unanswered for days, if at all. Sometimes I would just give up. Sometimes he would answer some but not all of my question. I would respond with the remaining questions and never hear back. There was no way to pick up the phone and reach someone. I called Alex back and told him the issues I was having. He basically reiterated that this is the way it works and generally once you get the hang of using Shipwire there would be no need to create cases. Ha.

But then the big problem. I decided that I no longer needed to use one of the locations to warehouse my goods and went about trying to figure out how to most cost effectively get my inventory back to me. The warehouse is close to where i live, so you would think that I would be able to go there with a truck and have it loaded (or load it ourselves) into a cube van. Nope. Shipwire doesn't allow you to do this.

Other than the ridiculous option of sending hundreds of cartons UPS ground at a cost of almost a thousand dollars, I was told that there was a freight option that I could sign up for. So I did. Oh, but when you use the freight option, there is an automatic fee of $300 applied just for going with that option. Then there are handling charges on top of that, no way of finding out what these handling charges are because there is no specific info on the site and - no way of contacting anyone except by creating a case - which may or may not be responded to in a satisfactory manner! So to get your goods out, you are paying not just for the freight charges or whoever you hire to transport the goods, but then an additional few hundred dollars (at least) on top of that. And even if you're willing to pay those charges, you have to wait days just to get an email back on how to START this process.

And then once you start the process, who knows how many days it will take for the warehouse to actually be ready to let your goods go? It feels as though my goods are being held hostage and I seriously regret that I went with Shipwire.It was supposed to be created for small businesses and yet all it has done is damaged mine.