Teavana - online Edit

After my last Teavana Online shopping experience I will never use their website to make purchases from them ever again.

I have made a total of four purchases with Teavana Online. The first was over a year ago, back in 2011, and was without issue.

The second was around the holiday season of 2011. I ordered two cups, a tea pot, and some tea. I received the order fairly quickly but the order was missing a cup. I called customer service who, without any issue, shipped out the missing replacement cup. Chocking it up to “these things happen”, I fully intended to order with them again and did.

The third order was this year, in May 2012. I had received a gift card as a birthday present and was eager to spend it on a new tea pot, some cute cups on sale, some extra storage tins, and of course, more tea. I placed my order, used the gift card as payment, and thought I was set. The online status of my order said “ReadyToShip”. After placing the order I was shuffled to a confirmation page saying I would get an email confirmation “soon” and could check my order status online. Two days go by and no email. I check my Spam folder. Nope. Not there. I check the order status on my account. Status: “ReadyToShip”. Hrmpfh. I started getting the sinking suspicion something was amiss. I emailed customer service inquiring about the status since it had been a few days. I provided the order number, date and time of purchase, advised I had used a gift card to pay, my name and address. Later that same day I get an email saying my order never actually processed and the agent can’t find my order to fix it. Apparently “ReadyToShip” means something went WRONG with the order and their system didn’t actually take it. I’m told this error can be for numerous reasons, they can’t tell me exactly what might have gone wrong, and I should just place my order again.

Really?

So I go to do that. And I put my gift card information in. And it says my gift card is used up. Why the agent didn’t realize this would happen I don’t know. So I email them again, this time saying my gift card is now used up and they need to fix it. The same agent replies, telling me it will take a few days for the gift card vendor they use to release the funds to the card again, but she will email me when that happens so I can re-do my order.

sigh

Fine! I’ll wait. I still had time on the sale and I was trying to practice my Zen nature by being patient.

Two days go by. I hear nothing. I go online to check the balance on the gift card. The balance is back to being the amount I had before my purchase. Alrighty then, the agent never emailed me but the gift card was fixed. Hurray! I’ll just place my order again and move on with life.

Can you guess what happened with my second order? Once again – “ReadyToShip” status, no email, and the order never processed. This time I gave it 24 hours, then emailed them again, demanding that a manager review the issue and reply. Something was obviously messed up with their ordering system and I didn’t want to just wait around and keep reordering and having the same thing happen.

The only reason I give Teavana Online a 2 star rating is because of the managerial response I received. The day after my second order didn’t process and I emailed them, a manager called me back to discuss the issue. He was very understanding, assured me that he had escalated the issue to their website IT department to see if they could figure out what error was going on and causing multiple orders to not process, and then filled my order for me for free. He put in a request to release the gift card funds too, so I had my original order sent without charge and my gift card still available.

I’ve never shopped online with a company whose website makes it appear your order processed when it didn’t. Most have ordering and processing systems that give the shopper some sort of indication if an order rejected for some reason. I also did not care for the attitude/response I got from the first agent. I’m not going into detail here because this review is quite long enough, but suffice to say she did have an attitude, even in email.

My forth order I finally got the gift card to work by using a different computer and different browser. It seems absolutely ridiculous to me that I had to do that to make the order work as the first computer/browser were up to date and a very popular browser. It might not have even been the change that finally got it to work. I will never know because Teavana themselves couldn’t figure it out to tell me. The entire experience with the last two orders was off putting enough that I feel no desire to utilize their website again anytime in the near future – especially not when I have a local retail store that pretty much always has everything I’d want and has the instant gratification of walking out with the items instead of waiting for shipping.

I really like Teavana. Yes, some of their teas are pricey, but the quality is actually good. I like that it’s reliable and loose-leaf. I’ve never dealt with pushy salespeople, but I usually know what I want. Great selection and I like that you can mix and blend and have fun with it.

I want to give a fair review, so I’m going to write exactly what my experience has been and try not to let my frustration blow the situation out of proportion. I’ve placed online orders with this company multiple times. I’ve only had a problem once and technically it wasn’t Teavana’s fault even though I believe they could have handled the situation better. Every other time I’ve placed an order it was shipped within 3 days of placement and I received my package the day after it was shipped (In NJ), or two days after shipment (when I was in Syracuse, NY). I wouldn’t advise ordering tins from them because mine always came dented; they don’t package their items well (there’s usually just one long piece of paper in the WHOLE box to ‘cushion’ the items). In short the packaging is scant, don’t get anything remotely fragile. BUT overall I have had a POSITIVE experience.

Now, onto the trouble. I placed two orders on 12/26/11 (normally I wouldn’t do this but they were having a sale) and my packages shipped on 12/29. One was delivered to the correct address and the other was mis-delivered by UPS to the wrong city. All of the information on the package was correct so it wasn’t really Teavana’s fault, nonetheless I had to deal with the merchant, not the courier. I called Teavana customer service the next day 12/30 and after waiting on hold for a little under 3 hours (my cell phone records the time, I jotted it down) I finally spoke to a representative who seemed as confused about the mishap as I. He then proceeded to call UPS to put a ‘tracer’ on the package. He called me back about an hour later and informed me it would take 3 business days before any info came back on the package and that Teavana would be in contact with me. A half an hour later I got a call from UPS verifying the contents of the package and my address. Since it was near a holiday I waited until January 10th before attempting to contact Teavana again since I hadn’t heard anything back. I waited on hold for 32 min before deciding to try again the next day at an earlier time. On Jan 11th I called at 8:57 am EST and waited on hold for 262 minutes and 35 seconds before giving up. I should note that the first time I called (on 12/30) I was given the queue number 108 so I knew it would be a long wait. The second time I wasn’t given a queue number, so I assumed I wouldn’t be on hold a long time…haha. Also, each time I was given the option to ‘request a callback’.
Realizing it wasn’t likely I’d be able to speak to someone I sent them an e-mail and got an automated reply stating I would receive a reply in 24-48 hours. After a week with no reply (fairly about 3 business days since I don’t know if they consider MLK day to be a holiday or not) I e-mailed them again on Jan 18th, this time the automated message didn’t state a time frame in which I would receive a reply it just said ‘as soon as possible’.
After waiting 3 weeks and not receiving a response, on Feb 7th I called customer service again, this time I was put on hold for less than 15 mins before speaking with a representative. I inquired about the lost package and the agent told me she could not give me a refund or take any action until UPS sent the package back to Teavana (which they had found, according to the UPS website), she then told me she would call UPS to see what was taking the ‘found’ package so long to get back to them. She called me back within 10 minutes and told me that UPS confirmed they had indeed lost my package (it was never found I suppose). The agent then told me she was issuing a refund for my purchase.

You can decide for yourself if you want to do business with Teavana. UPS has lost a package of mine before, from Amazon, but Amazon immediately resent the package (with Overnight shipping). I don’t think I should have had to wait and be penalized because of UPS’ mistake. I didn’t even really mind that I had to wait so long on the phone(it was the holiday season after all) but I think Teavana should have either resent the package or simply refunded my money. Why did I have to inquire about the status of my package after being lost for a month? Shouldn’t they have already refunded me or contacted me or something? I may be over-reacting but I think this was just poor customer care. I would understand the need to have the package in hand for a refund if Teavana were a small company, because the lost product would obviously have a much bigger impact. But Teavana is far from a small business. If you never need to deal with their customer service you will likely be a satisfied customer, as I previously was. I will still buy from them occasionally, but I don’t really trust them.
Customer service and proper packaging are important to me (especially if you pay full price for their tins, heaven forbid), I’d give them 2 and 1/2 stars, but since I can’t I’ll put down 3.

Never again. Overpriced, bad-tasting crap. We were tempted by their 75% off sale, mainly because of a matcha set because I’d been wanting to try matcha and that seemed an affordable way to do so.

Well, our order arrived with several things missing (including the matcha set) and other things broken (several little cups).

First of all, if things are going to be cancelled from a customer’s order, said customer needs to be contacted. If I had known I would never receive my matcha set, the entire order would have been cancelled.

We e-mailed customer service 4-5 times, no answer.
We called, we were put on hold for hours, asked to leave a callback number, and then never got a call back.
We contacted their twitter account (which seems to be full of nothing but apologies) and no answer.

Screw this company of crooks. I am disgusted that one will be opening near me soon, and I never, ever will set foot inside their store. I will also make sure everyone I know knows how this company scammed me.

And for all the trouble this place caused, their tea wasn’t even remotely worth it.

I believe it’s 3 Teavana locations within 5-6 miles of where I live…yeah. You see that map showing the location? There’s a Teavana in that mall and then there’s one in the mall across the street too (the first location, actually). Seriously. Needless to say if I can get free shipping, and I want something, I order online.

Of course their distribution center is in CT so it’s not like a fast order.

Compared to other options on the internet, there’s hardly an incentive to buy from them unless you really like the product they put out. They rarely have sales, they give you a sample but it’s filled with that rock sugar, but they are pretty good about having free shipping every so often like when their new collection came out.

I don’t care too much for their teas but I can’t help but like their website. I also love their Android app and its tea timer. It entertains me because the “water” moves if I tilt my phone.

Oh and as SimpliciTEA touched on, they do delete critical reviews. I wrote one for a tea, gave it 3 stars, and said it has too much hibiscus and it’s not on there anymore. Classy.

I updated this on 01/2012

Overall Experience: POSITIVE (with reservations regarding customer service, listed below)
I made three online purchases with them: one in January 2011, and two in January 2012.

General Information:
Facts and Observations : The only tea they sell is loose-leaf. Their focus seems to be on fruity, flavored teas. They do not have a wide variety of unflavored teas, but they do have a reasonable selection in every class of tea (with the exception of yellow), including Mate, Rooibos and other herbal teas. The descriptions of each tea seem to focus on the flavors of the fruits and other additives rather than on the base tea itself. They give no detail on the harvest date and little information on location—country only—-on any tea, with a few exceptions (Darjeeling is one). They offer a 10% discount for purchasing a pound or more, 15% for two pounds, and 20% for five or more. They sell many different tea accessories. You must buy at least two ounces of each tea. According to their website, they currently offer free samples with every order (although I received none). They occasionally have promotional offers. The have a big online sale at the end of the year, tea and items going for 30% – 75% off.
My Experience: 2011: I made an order for three different teas. After ordering it took over a week or more for my order to arrive, as they had to wait for one tea to come in from overseas before they could ship my order (even though it was listed as ‘in stock’). It turns out only two teas were shipped (see note below in shipping). Those teas, at least, were reasonably fresh. My understanding is that they source their own tea (being as large as they are). They have stores in most states, so if you live in the US it is likely you will be charged tax on your order, the amount of tax depending on where you live.
2012: They had a large selection of sale teas in their end-of-year sale. I received everything from my two orders, with the exception of one tea (that is currently on it’s way). Overall, I am happy with ordering from them. One interesting thing to note about their website, though: I noticed one tea that appeared that was not previously listed on their sale page. I put it in my cart, and took some time to decide on whether or not to order it. Less than an hour later it disappeared from the site, and later from my cart. What happened? I have NO idea. Yes, interesting indeed.

Website:
Their site is possibly the most colorful and professional looking tea site on the web. That is not to say it is the best. I personally do not like the continually changing images on their home page. And the pictures of their tea look like they put much more effort into the presentation than needed, and my guess is that that is reflected in the price of each tea. They do not give any specific information on how to brew each individual tea but only how to brew each class or type of tea. They have a section at the bottom of each tea page where they tell you which other teas blend well with it. You can maintain a wish list. You can get 5% your order if you choose auto-delivery. They have an account system whereby you can find the status of your order or shipment. They have some general information about tea, but its relegated to the bottom of the home page, which tells me they don’t think educating their customers about tea is very important. They have an interesting ‘Product Review’ system, but very few reviews have any criticisms at all about the tea, so I personally do not trust those reviews. They use secure server software (SSL) when you pay.
NOTE: When you buy their tea at the sale/discounted prices in the store, they do not add any bulk discounts in addition to the sale discounts. However, your online cart automatically takes the additional discount on sale teas. Yes, very cool. They currently have two discount codes: ‘5off30’, and ‘10off50’.

Shipping:
Facts: They use UPS for US and Canada, and IAPP worldwide: $4.75 per order in US ($8.75 for Canada; rates vary worldwide). You can also choose Priority, Air or Overnight shipping. Free shipping if order is $50 or over. You have the Ability to track the package online once it is in route. No matter how many ounces you buy they send it in tow ounce packages (I find this very wasteful when ordering over eight ounces of one particular tea).
My Experience: January 2011: there was one tea that was listed as ‘in stock’ but was not delivered (I was not charged for it). The invoice that came with the package stated that the tea was ‘backordered’. After waiting many days—-and checking my account on their website—-I finally called them to find out that they were completely sold out and would not be getting any more in. I was disappointed about that fact.
January 2012: I ordered twice; while both orders took a while to process and ship (at least a week from date of ordering to when they arrived), I did get everything I ordered in both shipments (there were no free samples in either, although their website states that they send free samples with every order). After I made my second order online, they sent me an email stating one tea was ‘on back-order’ and may take up to 30 days to get back in stock. A few days later I was notified that it shipped; although I have yet to get package, I expect it soon. I am glad that at least this year I have received/will be getting everything I ordered.

Contact Experience:
2011: I have called and talked to the sales people at the corporate offices and in local stores a number of times, and I judge that, although they seemed to know their ‘products’, they were not very knowledgeable about tea in general.
2012: I had a reasonably pleasant experience with the sales staff at one local store this year. She didn’t seem to be able to answer many questions I had about their teas, but she did make an effort to look for, and then find, answers to most of them; I was at least satisfied with that. I made two separate calls to this toll free phone number. The first time I was put on hold, and an automated system told me I was #164. I decided to wait, and was updated periodically on my place in line (which I appreciated), but after about 10 minutes, the system forced me to leave a message, due to ‘high call volume’. I left my number, and a message, but no one got back to me. The second time I called, I was, once again, put on hold (but for this call it did not give me my place in line. Strange.), and after 10- 15 minutes of waiting, I opted to leave a message for them to call me back; but something happened in trying to leave my number using the buttons on my phone (may have been my error) and I don’t think they got my number. Thus, again, no resolution. I have concluded that it’s about a snowball’s chance in h**l to get through to them (well, not really, but I mean really, come on guys! It shouldn’t be that hard to get a message through, let alone get called back!). Luckily, after each call an acceptable solution presented itself (not by Teavana).

Packaging:
No matter how much tea you order, it comes in small, decorated 2 oz vacuum-packed zip lock bags with the name of the tea and the ingredient list on a label (interestingly enough, I could not find the ingredient list on their website).

Would I buy from them again?: Conditionally, YES.
It is my belief that the quality of the tea they sell is not commensurate with the price. A large portion of the tea I buy is green tea, and they do not provide harvest seasons/dates for their any of their teas; since I do not know how old the tea is, I am only willing to buy it at a discount. The only reason I have ever bought tea from them was because it was discounted. And given their prices, that is the ONLY way I see purchasing from them in the future. I also realize I will very likely not get good customer service if there is an issue and I have to call them during a busy time. Having said that, I do think that most of their tea is worth buying at 50-75% off the regular price, and I have enjoyed every tea I have bought from them so far.