How not to run a business

Posted In: Everyday life — January 28, 2006 @ 11:22 am — Peter

In early November, Stephanie and I were quite pleased to find a custom baby mobile business on eBay. They offered a wide variety of figurines and music selections. Keeping with theme of Amelia’s nursery, we selected a butterfly mobile and Mozart wind-up tunes. In a week or so, our custom creation arrived….

Much to our surprise, the butterfly figurines were covered in glitter affixed with some sort of glue. Any reasonably intelligent adult would realize that glue degrades overtime and would result in loose glitter shedding from the butterfly. Actually, when I removed one of the butterflies, I ended up with plenty of glitter on my hands. Are we supposed to hang this over our baby? I think not!

Unfortunately, we lost track of time and were so preoccupied with the birth of our baby that we never took up dispute with the online retailer. A couple months later we visited our eBay profile and saw the reminder link “I need to leave feedback for 1 item”. Ah hah–we almost forgot to issue warning to other parents that the products being offered by Baby Melodies (http://stores.ebay.com/Babymelodies) were unsafe and not suitable for babies.

We said:

The mobile is junk. It’s covered in globs of glue and glitter. Dangerous!

They replied:

Rnbw Btrfly Safe frm Distr,No glb glu,NO Cmplnt frm Byr for 2.5 mo.Now Neg Here?

So, yesterday afternoon, a charming member of the Baby Melodies staff decided to give us a call at our home. Mind you, we never provided our phone number to this business, they took it upon themselves to scour the Internet for our phone number. Nice stalker tactic, you loon!

Clicky below to hear some stellar conflict resolution skills!
Steven Dill of Baby Melodies

In hindsight, perhaps we should have contacted the retailer sooner… However, we have a newborn, mediating this sale was surely not at the top of our agenda.

We aired our feelings about their product via the medium that eBay provides. Baby Melodies could have offered us a new mobile, sans glitter, and all would have been fine. Instead we get a lovely phone call. Needless to say, we’ll be reporting this incident to eBay customer support.

Here are a few photos of what Baby Melodies claims to be selling and what was actually delivered.. Nowhere on their product description did they say the butterflies would have glitter on them. One variation was said to have sequins, the other were painted. So receiving something covered in glitter regardless of the quality of application (which was piss poor) is not what they are marketing.

From their eBay store website:

What we received, note the glitter that has fallen off from handling!