Too Simple

I don’t have a lot of shoes. I’ve got a pair of sneak­ers, a pair of san­dals, a pair of boots, and two pairs of dress shoes (black and brown).

My sneak­ers and my san­dals have started to fall apart, so I was look­ing on Fat­Wal­let for deals on new ones. My new favorite place to get shoes is Zap­pos, an online shoe site that offers free ship­ping both ways, which is great for when shoes don’t fit right. That hap­pens to me a lot, because my feet, much like the rest of my body, are short but wide.

Any­ways, I was going to check out Zap­pos, but I found a great deal on a brand called Sim­ple Shoes on Fat­Wal­let. The brand is a bit more expen­sive then I nor­mally buy, but I con­sid­ered it a good value based on the fact that their prod­ucts are envi­ron­men­tally friendly, and their reviews sug­gest that the shoes will last for a long time.

By the way, Zap­pos actu­ally car­ries Sim­ple Shoes, too, and offers price-​matching, but they no longer had the clear­ance items in stock. Accord­ing to the Zap­pos web­site, the Sim­ple Shoes fit well in length and width, so I ordered my actual sizes for both new san­dals and new sneak­ers directly from Simple’s clear­ance page.

Got the ship­ment in a timely man­ner, but both items were too nar­row for me, despite the fact that I ordered the wide sizes. No prob­lem, I’d just ship it back to them and exchange for a big­ger size. Went on their web­site to get the return forms, and I noticed as I was check­ing size avail­abil­ity for exchange that the price of the “clear­ance” san­dals had gone up $10 since I had ordered them. Filled out the forms like nor­mal, and I noted in the com­ments sec­tion that I noticed that the price had gone up, and I didn’t want the san­dals any­more if they were going to charge me the dif­fer­ence. After all, if the shoes had fit prop­erly in the first place, I wouldn’t even have known the price went up.

Shipped the shoes back to them at my own cost; $12, which really negates most of the value I gained from buy­ing clear­ance items. I got an e-​mail con­fir­ma­tion of receipt of return from them, along with a mes­sage that the exchange was being processed and they gave me a new sales order for the new ship­ment. Oh, and a lit­tle note that my new ship­ment was $10 more than my old one, so they would be charg­ing the dif­fer­ence to my card. I imme­di­ately shot them an e-​mail back, telling them that as I had already stated on the return form, I did not want the san­dals if I was going to be charged more for them.

Checked my bank accounts online today and I noticed that the $10 charge was still there. I called up their Cus­tomer Ser­vice, and after being put imme­di­ately on hold, get­ting trans­fered to another line and being put on hold some more, I finally got to talk to some­one. He didn’t seem to see the ridicu­lous­ness of the charge, so I just can­celed my whole order. I’m still out my $12 for ship­ping the shoes back to them, though. If small claims court didn’t have a fil­ing fee of $20, I’d try to get that back, too.

Moral of the story is, don’t buy shoes from Sim­ple Shoes. It takes at least three dif­fer­ent mes­sages for them to get any­thing done.

UPDATE: Despite the fact that George, the cus­tomer ser­vice guy I talked to, told me my order would be can­celed imme­di­ately and he would send me an e-​mail con­firm­ing as much, I just got an e-​mail from Sim­ple with the track­ing num­ber on my new order.

UPDATE 2: I responded to the e-​mail with the track­ing num­ber, and asked if it really shipped, since I had can­celed the whole order. Got a reply today from a dif­fer­ent cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Janet Men­now, that said they showed no record of my can­cel­la­tion, and to return it to them, I had to refuse it at the door for UPS to ship it back to them. And she said they would refund the cost of the items to me, but not the cost of shipping.