Has anyone had a good experience with this vendor? They have lots of negative reviews, and they seem to be using photographs stolen from other websites, but they offer unique products - including multiple varieties of hard to find fresh pepper pods and herbs.
vendor CaribbeanGardenSeed
- Thread starter spicy.curry
- Start date
Bou
eXtreme
Don't know about them but if they are really stealing pictures from others and do have many bad reviews, do you really think their "unique products" would really be genuine? Personally I'd stay far away from this kind of store if what you wrote is true... my two cents.
HellfireFarm
eXtreme
Google reviews and FB posts (comments to their posts) show it's a scam and they do not even send the product. Also a red flag for me is when companies on FB don't have the reviews tab. Why? FB does not allow a company to delete them so when they get bad reviews they end up turning the reviews function off.
I made a write-up on this company and their history on TEG. Lemme copy and paste it as a quote.
Ultimately, I don't recommend buying from them.Caribbean Garden Seed is a pretty infamous seed company, known for scamming people according to their Better Business Bureau profile. When people bought seeds and tulips from them on their website, they either didn't arrive or arrived in awful condition. The behavior by the company is so bad that one buyer wants you to call the police.
According to Better Business Bureau and the Pennsylvania government archives, this company has been in business for seven years with an LLC registration date of September 21, 2015. Etsy archives say that it was in business for longer. The Etsy archives circa 2013-2014 have loads of 5-star reviews.
(Pictured on September 28, 2014)
An important question to ask is "where did it all go wrong?"
I have two theories.
Theory 1 is that the company has always been scammy, and they've been manipulating reviews. This is supported by several allegations in their reviews on BBB and Google that most, if not all positive reviews are by the company itself or people affiliated with it. It's also supported by the fact that the grammar on the shop was unchanged between its Etsy and website incarnation.
According to a theory, many scammers purposefully type with unproper grammar to catch people who aren't paying attention. I'm not telling you to judge a company based on proper grammar firsthand, you really shouldn't, but this grammar is just one of the attributes of some scams.
Theory 2 is that the company was bought out. This is supported by the trademark filing date being after the business was on Etsy, and the possibility of the "review manipulation" theory not being true. It's also supported by the fact that its Etsy account was banned without warning, after people started reacting negatively to it.