IsraelSims.com update

Today’s update in the IsraelSims.com saga…

According to my credit card’s Web site, IsraelSims did, indeed, refund my payment to them on July 28.

Although I would like to believe they did it before I sent them my nasty email, there’s no way of knowing, since (a) that’s the day I emailed them, (b) they did not notify me that they had issued a refund until a day later, and (c) the bank only has the date of the transaction, not the time.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether they refunded my money because they “felt so bad about what happened,” as they claimed, or because they received the nasty email in which I demanded that they do so, or because they realized that it was better to refund my money up-front then rather than forcing me to initiate a charge-back. Charge-backs cost the merchant an extra fee and cause their merchant account rates to go up if they have too many of them.

I also leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether I should give a rat’s ass whether they “felt so bad about what happened,” when they apparently didn’t feel bad enough to return my phone calls or email messages or FedEx the replacement cards on July 27 as they said they were going to.

The first set of SIM cards, which they claim were shipped on July 20 but the postal service says didn’t reach a sorting facility until July 27, arrived today. I took a picture of it before putting it back in the mail to be returned to them, and this picture illustrates one reason why it was delayed:

As you can see, although the cards were sent in a regular business envelope, the shipping label is on the envelope sideways. According to postal service regulations, this makes the envelope “nonmachinable,” which means that it has to be processed by hand every step of the way.

The label says that IsraelSims uses endicia.com for their postage printing. Endicia supports printing the recipient address, return address and postage directly onto an envelope in the proper orientation, as opposed to printing onto a label as IsraelSims did. In short, IsraelSims could be mailing out SIM cards as machinable letters, which would reduce the postage cost and speed up delivery time, but instead they are sending them out as parcels.

One would think that a company whose entire business involves mailing things to people, often with hard deadlines, would know this.