Cassandrasplants Reviews 

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Updated Nov 26, 2021

Hi

Thank you for your review, however I am a little disappointed you feel this was our fault. As mentioned, we explained the T&C’s to you (which you agreed to on purchasing) and we explained that we would have extended the 12 hour reporting period to 48 hours for you as it was a gift however we were still not contacted until a week after delivery.
You also told us that the recipient watered the plant on arrival whilst still partially wrapped in the protective wrapping for shipping, which is what caused the leaf drop. This was a large trailing plant that had had the stems carefully wrapped together for shipping above the pot. On watering, the water has clearly pooled on the curly leaves of the wrapped stems, causing moisture to be retained in the packaging, causing them to rot and fall off when the plant was finally fully unwrapped 3 days later.
This damage was clearly visible in the pictures we received as the leaf drop was from the end of the stem moving towards the pot. The last quarter of the stems closest to the pot still had intact green leaves as luckily no water or moisture had reached down that far yet. This was fully explained to you in an email and we would have offered advise on how to save the plant however you stopped replying to us. As this incorrect treatment of the plant was out of your control too we offered you a 20% credit for the value of this plant towards another as a goodwill gesture, however this was refused. Unfortunately we cannot be held accountable for incorrect care once a plant is with the customer and we would have appreciated you informing the recipient of the reporting timeframes once the plants had been delivered so they knew to open the plant fully on arrival.
We are disappointed that even though the other plant you ordered you described as perfect you still felt your experience with us warranted a 1 star review.

Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Nov 26, 2021

Hi Mellisa

Thank you for your review, we hope you are enjoying your new plants.

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Sep 2, 2021

Hi
Thank you for your review, we hope your plants are happy in their new home!
Many thanks
Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Jul 19, 2021

Hi

Thank you for your review, we hope your plants are happy in their new home!

Many thanks
Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Updated Jul 19, 2021

Hi Denisa

Thank you for your review. We tried to help you as much as we could however due to the length of time you took to contact us, (well over a week) and the inability to send pictures of the plants on arrival we were limited in our options. We clearly explained our policies to you which you confirmed you understood and had agreed to when purchasing. We had to chase you multiple times for a response only for you to reply once we had confirmed we would no longer be able to assist you with your issue due to length of time passed.

It was clear from the pictures that were eventually sent they had been kept in severely adverse conditions. You provided no evidence of pests at all, and none of the plants were mislabelled. We explained to you in multiple emails you had purchased the wrong species or had expected a different plant from the picture and description we supplied on our website. We provided in-depth information on this with multiple examples of other species and photographs that showed this was unfortunately your error and you had been supplied the plant you purchased.

Due to you realising you had not followed our policies, you made use of a loop hole in the PayPal buyer protection T&C’s, with regards to perishable items, and PayPal partially refunded you, not only for the plants that had sadly died due to the poor conditions, but also the plant you say was mislabelled but in perfect health which you are yet to return to us.

Due to this we have since removed PayPal from our website and lodged a formal complaint with them regarding their handling of your case and we currently await their response. We sincerely hope you do not make use of the loop hole again when buying from other small sellers.

Edited response -

When you purchased from any company you sign up to what is effectively a buyer contract, (see the consumer contacts regulation 2014) which puts some responsibility on you as the buyer to understand what you need to do if there is an issue. That is not deflecting blame.
Your plants were delivered around 8am on a Friday morning, you contacted us first on the Sunday night without pictures, we then received nothing for 4 further days despite multiple urgent chases when pictures were finally sent. If the plants were in the conditions in the pictures when you opened the boxes, with your extensive plant knowledge, I would have expected immediate contact with pictures. We cannot be held responsible for circumstances out side of our control. You made us aware of circumstances which caused the delay in replying which we also believe lead to the poor care of these plants.

We appreciate your recommendations and will be more than happy to send you pictures of our plant space and the conditions they are kept in. We ship over 200 plants a week and provide a variety of conditions for all of the plant species we stock, including grow lighting and humidifiers as you mentioned. We also have an extensive quality checking process prior to shipping including a minimum 2 week quarantine period from receipt of the grower, all natural preventative pest treatments and 10 point checking system our packers use to confirm quality prior to shipping.

It is clear from your multiple edited responses you have still not read the T&C’s you sign up to. They clearly state all health issues or damage needs to reported to our email address sales@cassandrasplants.co.uk within 12 hours of delivery and then lists examples of pictures we would need depending on your issue. Our email address and information is also provided on the invoice included with your parcel and when you open the chat on our website, the information is also readily available there. At no point were you advised to reach out via the contact form as we are fully aware you cannot upload photo’s.

However our CEO was working late and saw your email come in around 21:20 on a Sunday evening. They replied out of hours within 25 minutes, asking you to follow the correct process and to send pictures as soon as you could in the morning so they could be reviewed ASAP. They exercised their discretion and gave you the benefit of the doubt for 1. Not following the policies guidelines, and 2. Being 48 hours or so late in contacting us.

We then received no further emails despite multiple chases until after we had advised you we considered your issues resolved due to time passed and lack of response. You were not ignored. We then dealt with you on and assigned priority basis due to your issue being resolved and replied as soon as we could. In the email you finally sent as mentioned before none of the pictures showed any of the plants on arrival, or were as requested by the CEO’s original email.

There is no legal requirement to quarantine imported or any plants, we do this for benefit of our customers. As I am sure you have seen most garden centres go straight from lorry to display in a day or two. The practice of months quarantining you speak of is for rare plants worth £100’s, plants propagated directly by the seller or people who import from Asia, which we do not do.

The chargeback facility made available by banks and payment providers is to be used in extreme circumstances and using that processes to hold small businesses to ransom when you have not followed their policies is a risky practice, as you can be investigated for fraud with continued use.

As mentioned above we did everything we could for you given the situation. Our policies are there to protect our customer as well as us and if you had followed them like you agreed to when ticking the T&C’s box when purchasing, we would have been able to do more for you.

As we have now been notified of your 8th edit we will no longer be responding, however we do hope the surviving plants are thriving in their new home.

Many Thanks
Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Jul 19, 2021

Hi Claudia!

Thank you for your review, we hope your plants are happy in their new home!

Many thanks
Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Jul 19, 2021

Hi

Thank you for your review, we hope your plants are happy in their new home!

Many thanks
Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Jul 13, 2021

Hi Caroline

Thank you so much for your review and taking the time to feedback it is much appreciated. We hope you plants are happy in their new home!

Many thanks
Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Jul 12, 2021

Hi

Thank you for taking the time to review. We hope your plants are happy in their new home, and appreciate your feedback.

Sometimes the growers we purchase from do take cuttings from plants for propagation or the plant itself will be made up of cuttings. This is completely normal and shouldn’t effect the plant at all.

Many thanks
Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Updated Jul 12, 2021

Hi

Thank you for your review, unfortunately we haven’t received any prior contact from you regarding an issue with your order. If you would like to email us at sales@cassandrasplants.co.uk we would be happy to look into this for you.

Many thanks
Cassandra’s Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Jul 12, 2021

Hi Nicole

Thank you so much for the review we hope your plants are loving their new home.

Many thanks
Cassandra's Plants.

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Updated Jul 12, 2021

Hi Amanda

Thank you for your review. Please speak to your friend regarding the outcome of her experience as there is a lot of information missing from your review.

We confirmed last week in 2 messages to your friend that we would be issuing a full refund in due course. DPD had kindly offered to also refund the original shipping and £9 return fee to us, as a gesture of goodwill which they are under no obligation to do so. We have also offered a full refund as the plant has been received back and has been inspected and is in a condition we are happy to accept a return on, so your friend has lost no money.

As a business, we reserve the right to refuse service to any customer. If you or your friend would like clarification around our decision to not accept further orders the buyer is welcome to email us, however, we do not base this decision on customer reviews. There are multiple factors involved and that due to GDPR we will be more than happy to explain to her directly.

The extract you chose to include is taken from our full response to the buyer's review which is here in full -

"Thank you for your review please check your messages we have offered you a full refund. DPD tried to deliver to your friend 3 times over 6 days which is an extra attempt than they have to for perishable goods. You received 9 emails from them with delivery information and your friend was carded 3 times and made no contact with DPD even though we asked multiple times and spoke to her directly. DPD on this occasion have offered to refund the shipping and return fee and luckily they didn’t destroy the plant as per their normal process. Your review and last message were sent at midnight without giving us the opportunity to respond and explain what DPD had offered. We went over and above to get this plant to your friend and so has DPD however if they are not in to accept the parcel there is not much else we can do"

In trying to improve our customer service we sent your friend a detailed chronological breakdown of everything thing that we had done to get the parcel to you, which we received no response to, including some of the below details.

1. We facilitated a late request for a gift message request, received on the day of shipping, that wasn't included with the original order. We created a special one off message especially for your friend as it wasn't included at check out and so we couldn't use the standard Etsy template. - She was very grateful for this.
2. We were made aware of some extraordinary circumstances by the buyer, which could lead to her delayed response to messages / emails, therefore after the second failed delivery attempt we also contacted her, which we do not normally do, as DPD will. This was to give her the most amount of time possible to provide extra delivery information such as a safe place etc which we would have happily relayed to DPD on her/your behalf.
3. We called DPD 5 times on your behalf as neither of you contacted them to provide further delivery information. Any time extra delivery information is provided it is logged as a tracking update that is visible to us, and there are none outside of us requesting the 3rd delivery attempt.
4. There was some clear confusion in the messages between you and the buyer and you and us around the dates the deliveries were attempted. You mentioned firstly that you thought DPD had attempted to deliver twice on Friday the 2nd. When we responded saying DPD do no attempt to deliver twice in one day, and explained how you had misinterpreted a message from your friend, you changed to say Friday and Saturday attempts which was still incorrect. The three attempts were made on the 1st July (Thursday) 2nd July (Friday) and the 6th (Tuesday) and we offered to send a screenshot of the full detailed tracking we can see. We have yet to receive a response from you or your friend other than this review.
5. You confirmed on multiple occasions that the photos that DPD provided of the no answer address were of your property. Even if DPD like you say didn't card you they were 100% at your property on 3 separate occasions. It is not unreasonable to presume that if you are expecting a delivery that had previously been missed that you watch/listen out for the driver during the hour time slot provided. We also recommended/informed the buyer that if you have the DPD app you also get 30 min and next stop notifications, to make this process even easier for you.
6. Lastly as we ship plants that are considered perishable items i.e. items that can deteriorate quickly if not in the right conditions, our policies are very clear on both Etsy and our website. We are at no point obliged to accept a forced return and we are extremely grateful that DPD have managed to keep the plant in such great condition considering it had been in transit for nearly a week.

At no point have we called you a liar, we have only passed on the information available to us from DPD. Please also remember we are a small family run business and not Amazon. We are reliant on our customer's willingness to communicate with us and DPD if there is an issue. However on this occasion that just didn't happen and we are sorry that we were unable to assist more.

Many thanks
Cassandra's Plants

Edited response -

We cannot be held responsible for the buyer not passing delivery information on to you. The gift could have still been a surprise as nowhere during the delivery process is the content of the parcel revealed. Also, we have received a screenshot from the buyer of you asking her for the delivery time slots, so we are aware you had the delivery times. We have also seen a screenshot of you saying the person home on one of the attempts when out roughly at 11 am for an hour. The attempt that day was as 10:48, I recommend confirming with the buyer what information has been shared with us.
If our offer of sharing the full tracking information had been accepted you would be able to see that each picture taken is linked to a specific date, time and GPS location. There are 3 pictures on 3 separate days.
Your contacting DPD is not dependant on you receiving a card, all you need is the tracking number that the buyer had. You can provide extra delivery information on the website or via the app and all you need is the tracking number and postcode.
It is not a case of us believing DPD over you, it is understanding that it is not in DPD's drivers' interest to forge tracking information. All DPD drivers are self-employed and if any parcels they are responsible for gets refunded this cost plus the cost of the goods if applicable gets deducted from their contracted payment. We will never know for sure what was the reason for the misunderstanding here, but a full refund has now been issued.

Many thanks
Cassandra's Plants

Reply from Cassandrasplants

Jul 19, 2021

Hi Kim

Thank you for your review, we hope your plants are happy in their new home!

Many thanks
Cassandra’s Plants