Shop Review/Guide

    Shop Review: EyeCandy’s (eyecandys.com)

    21 May 2016

    eyecandys

    I’m starting a new section on this blog, which is to provide reviews or guides to shops. My focus will mostly be on online shops since that’s where I do most of my shopping, although I plan to have guides to physical shops in Japan in the future too.

    The first shop review is on an online shop called EyeCandy’s.

    EyeCandy’s sells beauty products and accessories, but are probably mostly know for their wide variety of colored contact lens.

    I purchased from them once about 2 years ago, and the order went smoothly then, so when I was looking for a pair of contacts recently, I didn’t think twice before ordering with them again.

    Days passed, and my order still hasn’t been updated, and it was then I decided to go google and I found out too late that things aren’t quite the same.

    Specifically, their handling of orders appeared to be erratic and unpredictable. On a review site and even on their own Facebook page, smatterings of such messages can be seen:

    eyecandys5

    eyecandys4

    At that point I was like “Shit, shit, shit…!”

    I decided to contact them and could only pray they replied.

    Here is a timeline to better illustrate how things went:

    May 2 (Mon, 1 am) – Placed order

    According to their ordering guide (and also similarly worded in their shipping policies and emails):

    “We will drop your order off at the post office 1 to 4 business days after your payment has been received/cleared.”
    and
    “We will update your account status from “Awaiting Fulfilment” to “Shipped” 3 to 4 business days after receiving your payment.”

    May 7 (Sat, 3.22am) – 4 business days later (May 2 was a holiday), but still no updates. I read the online reviews, panicked a bit, and decided to email them.

    May 8 (Sun, 7.34am) – They did not reply me, but order was updated to “Shipped”, and a tracking number was provided.

    However, in the email, what Shipped means is that

    “Your order despatched 2-3 days ago from our warehouse and is in transit to you.”

    But from the records, it shows that the post office received it on May 7, the day I emailed them. Not “2-3 days ago” as it should have been. It seems to indicate that they sent out my order only when they saw my email…

    eyecandys3

    May 14 – The package was delivered to my home.

    As you can see, the moment the package left Hong Kong, it took just 3 DAYS for it to reach me, and that’s including the flight to Japan AND traveling within Japan. The bulk of the waiting time lies with EyeCandy’s processing and the hold up in Hong Kong (no idea why it was sitting for 4 days in Hong Kong for).

    More importantly, I don’t even want to imagine where my order would be if I hadn’t sent the email to prod them along. If you’re still waiting on your order, send EyeCandy’s an email! Reply to the order email they sent you so they will have all the order details. They may not be polite enough to reply you, but they might take action on your order.

    Apart from the shipping, I don’t have anything to complain about the items themselves. They were well-packaged, arriving in a bubble-padded envelope, and the lenses were without issues.

    Verdict

    EyeCandy’s has a good selection of contact lenses, prices are reasonable, and they have pretty solid branding, what with working with many bloggers, personalizing their packaging and even making a lens care guide book and card (pictured above).

    I thankfully received my order without much delay, but a large part might be due to the fact that I contacted them myself first.

    However, I think that their shipping and customer service department would benefit from improvement. No decent company should ever put their customers through any such anxiety or distress nor have them chase you for deadlines that you set yourself.

    It’s a shame really, because it could have been a great online shop otherwise.

    I won’t say I’ll never shop with them again, but they most certainly aren’t my first choice to shop at, when they potentially could have been.

    Read the disclaimer regarding reviews here.
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