Mail order crabs

[me n my hermikids]

Enough time has passed to file the claim with paypal they said they are going to give them a little more time to respond. Grrr!

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[wodesorel]

Enough time has passed to file the claim with paypal they said they are going to give them a little more time to respond. Grrr!

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Paypal only gets their cut of the fees if they don't give a refund. They're looking out for themselves. They need to wait to hear from her and see if she produces a reason for the delay or proof of shipping, which is pretty standard. It takes a while, but so long as you read and follow their directions to a T you'll get your money back. Paypal is actually really horrible to sellers but great to buyers. I've done a lot of business through them but never had a dispute because I bent over backwards to keep the unhappy people happy before they ever felt the need to go to Paypal. (It was all shipping related and completely out of my hands, not that Paypal would have cared.)

[me n my hermikids]

Thanks 4 the advice I think I will ask them to comunicate by email so I have records. Probably gonna have a battle on my hands and I was sooo excited about getting my little E's, too. :€

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[Crabber85]

@wodesorel, sorry I came off so hateful being autistic I tend to miss the emotional boat on a lot of things it wasn't my intent to be cold or harsh like you I just don't get how she's still able to do business with so many complaints against her.

I do know of the handful of members I have dealt with over at the old Landhermitcrabs.com that all of them also filed complaints against the website with the BBB or Better Business Bureau and the last update that the BBB gave us was that they were giving her website a poor rating and were also looking at taking some other steps against her in an effort to shut her website down but that was in 2012.

[wodesorel]

Crabber, it didn't come off that way at all! I just wanted to point out that while it was a similar situation, it wasn't the same person as ELHC.

To import animals legally, it takes a lot of funds - about $1,100 per shipment in just fees and transport, not for the actual animals - and so you have to order in a lot of 'product' to make that cost worthwhile. We're talking thousands upon thousands of crabs, already in poor shape, already dying from bad collecting and transporting practices, all jammed into someone's house for months on end until they are sold. It doesn't surprise me that the type of people who get into it are also the ones who end up flaking. To witness that much death just for profit... I don't know what kind of person you would have to be to keep doing it year after year. And she had told people last year that the Blues snowed up dead and dying, so there was lost money right there. I just... from a business standpoint it's a huge financial gambol, and at some point if there are a few 'bad' (ie dead) shipments there goes the profit for the entire year.

[Crabber85]

@wodesorel, the lady who owns my local mom and pop pet store told me years ago that the reason she stopped selling hermitcrab species other than the PP and E was that the cost for getting the exotics in had gone up and it was costing her thirty bucks a crab for Straws and Ruggies and she couldn't justify charging her customers in excess of fifty dollars per crab to cover her own overhead costs to just get them in the store so she stopped selling them and went PP and E only and has been that way for the last ten years.

I forget the names of the couple who owned the ELHC site but they were constantly getting complaints about how the crabs they'd sold were showing up either dead, dying or mite infested and the only response that was given on their end was oops sorry they came to us that way and we couldn't clear the issue up before we sent your crabs to you.

I know for fact the husband admitted to only having four fifty-five gallon aquariums that he consistently overstocked on a regular basis and his reason for this was lack of space for additional aquariums so he was loosing a lot of his stock to cannibalism due to overcrowding and poor nutrition after he said all that I was like bump that mess I sure wont be doing business with him.

I had to correspond with him via email to get some kind of resolution for the members of the LHC forums who'd purchased from him and what he had to say to me was a lot of non-sense and garbage about how he knew how to properly care for hermitcrabs but gave me that whole spill about the crabs only need one foot of space per crab and that they could live just fine on kitty litter...

I then gave him a bunch of links to threads on proper hermitcrab care and what an actual good setup would be and how to achieve it and his response was I think thats all a bunch of overkill and nonsense you really don't have to provide all that for them and he left it like that.

I wish I'd kept the emails but my email account was jacked up due to a technical issues Yahoo was having with their servers so I lost four years worth of emails overnight.

I wasn't long after that series of correspondences that he shut his website down for supposed maintenance issues and then three weeks later he lost his certificate on the website for failure to make payments and it was permanently shut down at that point the domain has been up for sale ever since.

[wodesorel]

The story we got here from people who were friends with him and who met with him is was that it was serious health problems that made him shut down. The differences in the details is really interesting, wish our groups had been more involved back then! Probably would have saved a lot of people a lot of headache. (The ELHC stuff should still be in our archives if you're ever interested.)

LHC has been having trouble for years now, but she is/was the only exotic source available.

[me n my hermikids]

I understand family hardship, Heaven knows I have seen my share of that. What I dont understand is why they keep taking peoples money. Shut the website down if you arent able to run it, people!

[Crabber85]

@me n my hermikids, yeah I agree I mean I've been involved with photography business for several years now and we've had customers actually steal from us and then lie about it in front of us which is why we stopped doing our customary half payment up front because there were those folks who would write us bad checks knowing that if we cashed them they'd bounce and then we'd deliver the product only to be told that they didn't have the money after they'd gotten the photos in their hands so now we expect full payment upfront and we have a contract that the customer has to sign and abide by now in order to get their pictures developed, processed and delivered and we take our business seriously we do everything we can to please the client to a reasonable extent and we have never not done a good job and then expected to be paid for it anyway.

I guess what I'm saying is as a businessman to see other companies or businesses ripping their customers off goes against my code of morals and ethics so like you I don't understand why the owner of LiveHermitcrabs.com doesn't take the moral high road and just shut down especially when she knows she's essentially taking money from her customers for nothing and by its very definition isn't that considered theft?

[marandashermies]

I ordered 3 E's months and months ago. I sent numerous emails and she never responded. Last week I filed a claim with PayPal to get my money back and receive notification within a few days that they were sending me a full refund. Livehermitcrabs.com also decided to finally email me back. She said she isn't able to fill the orders due to health issues. That she wasn't even able to get to the computer to respond (which I don't believe, because she was able to get to the computer once the claim was filled for my money back), but regardless, PayPal was excellent with refunding me.

But for everyone who is thinking about ordering from her, DON'T! Your order will not be filled and you will be out that money for a while.

[KellyCrabbieLove]

@me n my hermikids, yeah I agree I mean I've been involved with photography business for several years now and we've had customers actually steal from us and then lie about it in front of us which is why we stopped doing our customary half payment up front because there were those folks who would write us bad checks knowing that if we cashed them they'd bounce and then we'd deliver the product only to be told that they didn't have the money after they'd gotten the photos in their hands so now we expect full payment upfront and we have a contract that the customer has to sign and abide by now in order to get their pictures developed, processed and delivered and we take our business seriously we do everything we can to please the client to a reasonable extent and we have never not done a good job and then expected to be paid for it anyway.

I guess what I'm saying is as a businessman to see other companies or businesses ripping their customers off goes against my code of morals and ethics so like you I don't understand why the owner of LiveHermitcrabs.com doesn't take the moral high road and just shut down especially when she knows she's essentially taking money from her customers for nothing and by its very definition isn't that considered theft?

Theft and fraud.

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[Crab_Coalition]

Theft and fraud.

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It is. I did speak to them sometime last year and they said they were discontinuing Strawberries and few others and were closing down due to health issues BUT they were still selling PPs.

Don't know if its too late but I did find another place there were selling crabs out of Florida and they seemed pretty good about responding.

There is also a wholesale place I know many will not be interested in as they sell 50 at a time at extremely low costs. I will going to go to them once I get either a couple of 55 gals set up. I gave up on wanting a 200 gallon because it would be hard if i had to clean it all at once so I am going to block off space and buy like 4x 55 gal tanks and place them next to each other. May find a way to create a tubing where they can travel between tanks one day. (-:

Right now I have a 40 gal and want to upgrade to a 55 gal BUT only when I have acquired more knowledge and experience from you guys about proper hermit care. I think I am doing great but there is always room to learn and gain wisdom from others experiences.

Once I have reached a 150-200 crab capacity, which will be primarily PPs but also have Blueberrys, a few strawberries and a group of E's then I will consider myself a Jedi Crab Master of the First Order knowing there are 100 more levels to obtain. LOL