Originally Posted by 1AP12NV,Jul 21 2005, 04:32 AM

Um first of all, your doubts were well placed, this is not in fact the forum for this as Coastal Metals is not a JDM company to my knowledge.

Second of all it sounds like you had a pretty good experience with them and trying to tarnish a company's name on the internet by posting this kind of thing gets under my skin.

It is common practice for e-commerce websites to charge your credit card upon placing the order (on many it is automatic), then the order is fulfilled. Frequenters of this forum are used many times to paying a couple thousand dollars for a product up front and then waiting 3-4 months while it is shipped over from Japan.

It sounds to me like the rep at Coastal handled your order very well. He stayed in contact, let you know honestly what was going on, and when you asked for a refund promptly refunded your money. He even attempted to perhaps keep you as a customer by offering to let you know when they had more in stock.

Every company has fullfillment issues from time to time if they are a retailer and production issues if they are a manufacturer. It happens. It's how you handle them that shows what kind of vendor / manufacturer you are. From your description it sounds like they handled a production problem well and deserve a :thumbup:

I think your expectations of an online vendor are unreasonable.

-J

(Sorry to rant, but running an online business myself it is frustrating to deal with certain customers that are never satisfied no matter how far you go to make sure a deal goes smoothly or handle production/fullfillment hiccups well)