Complaint Review: international checkout - Van Nuys California

We have used International Checkout as a provider of international shipping for orders we take from our customers. I'm posting here because I want to urge all consumers and other businesses to avoid this company at all costs.

Our initial dealings with International Checkout seemed okay. Customers would order through our website, get redirected to the IC checkout page, complete their order, and then International Checkout would order from us. We would then ship the product to their warehouse and they would forward to the customer. In essence, IC was acting as a buyer on behalf of the international customer.

Soon after we started operations we started hearing a lot of complaints, consistent with what you read above, as far as ridiculously high "shipping" charges being charged during checkout to customers. We received several of these, but I have no idea how many customers simply abandoned the shopping cart once they saw the prices. We were hearing about prices between $150-$200 to ship an item to the UK from the USA.

What we weren't aware of, even as a merchant that was using the services of IC, is that, just as the person posting above pointed out, IC has to make 20% profit on all orders. So they expect a discount from the merchant on the orders they place on behalf of the customer + the charges they tack onto the "shipping and handling" the customers see at checkout to = 20% of the cost of the item.

We only became aware of this after we were using their services, and questioned why the customers were being quoted such ridiculous shipping fees. We were told that we could increase our discount to IC, and the customers would then pay less in shipping/handling, but we were already giving them a discount which was in essence paying for the service they were providing for us (international shipping logistics).

So time went on, and the complaints kept coming, and we saw some orders, and a vast majority of the orders that we processed through International Checkout were handled extremely slowly, or poorly. Product wasn't being sent to customers in a timely fashion, we're talking months for customers to receive an order,  customers were telling us that International Checkout customer service wasn't giving them updates, or was rude when they spoke to them.

This happened on a number of occasions. It finally got so bad that we decided to drop them, and handle international shipping ourselves. We have now seen an exponential growth in international orders coming through. I have never had such a poor service experience with a company before. There are more specific details I could add, like IC attempting to export product we sent to them, illegally, out of the country, but I want to keep this post at a reasonable length.

What sickens me is the part of the post above regarding the security issues at IC. As a result of the information above, I just called them and verified a lot of the information documented above is correct. They were hacked, credit card numbers were stolen. They also verified they had an employee that stole credit card info, but apparently they only stole the IC business credit card, not consumer credit cards.

Apparently a letter was supposed to go out in the physical mail to each and every customer whose credit card was in their system, but strangely enough our company never got the letter, and our business credit card info is in their system as we had to purchase items through them for a couple transactions, so we were a 'customer' of theirs. When I asked about this I was told "every customer received the letter", but we did not, which is funny.

When I asked how can you possible not contact me to let me know our information was compromised, mind you I am a MERCHANT, who was helping make this company money, and I was told "we satisfied our legal obligation". Penn State anyone? I was assured that if we didn't see any fraudulent charges yet, we wouldn't. Really, "how do know that" was my obvious response. I was told the Secret Service "handled" the situation but I couldn't be given any more info on the matter. Is this the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard or what?

At the end of the day, this company has zero integrity, and deserves to be out of business. They couldn't care less about their own customers, or even about their merchant partners. They provide a horrendous service, at a ridiculous cost, with serious security issues. Take a look at the merchant sin their various category pages on their site, and then check back on those in several months. There will likely be a lot of turnover, which is what we've seen since we started with them. This is because once people experience their service, and have their customers complaining about it, they drop them like we did.

Do not buy anything through them, do not partner with them, avoid this company or you will regret it.