Kevin G.

Bulk Apothecary could be a tremendous company, but their owners seem to not care at all. I truly feel bad for their customer service reps the most. They have to take the brunt of customers who are furious over the constant issues with their items not being in stock. Worse yet is when they it is in stock and you order it and guess what happens. They refund the money and give no explanation.

I have been running businesses for over 20 years. I completely understand that running out of things can happen. However, I am really wondering how items on their site can be out of stock for small amounts when they still offer case quantity items.

For the past 6 to 8 months we were told that they were going to sync their online inventory with their actual physical inventory. Because of numerous out of stock issues as a company we had quit ordering from them and decided to go with their competitors who have never been out of stock on any item.

This past month we decided to give them a shot at gaining our business again. For those that do not know... They do have on average the best pricing on their products (when they are in stock for real).

We placed an order a couple weeks ago with no issues. They are always prompt on their shipping and the items have never been an issue for us. Today we decided to give them another try. We ordered bottles, caps, potassium hydroxide and orange essential oil (16oz) so that we could fulfill some orders that were coming up.

After placing the order and paying we received an email a couple hours later stating that they had shipped our order. As always we check all emails from our suppliers to make sure that the correct items appear in the details of the shipment.

The first thing we notice is that only 3 of the 4 items we ordered had been shipped. No note was on our email stating that they were out of our Essential Oil. In fact it was not until I called that their customer rep told me that they were out of the orange essential oil I had ordered and were simply refunding our money. No notice, no asking if we wanted to wait for it to come in (btw they normally take months to get items in... in fact one item we have monitored has been out of stock for almost a year now).

While speaking with the rep I asked him if the owners even really understood how negatively this impacts their business to always have these issues. He said that they have had a company meeting and were going to fix the problem really soon. ( 6 months ago they said the same thing)

Here is what I find most interesting. Last year we had multiple order issues with them. When we attempted to give a product rating on an item we had an issue with regarding quality they never allowed the negative review. It is impossible for any company to have a 5 star review on pretty much all of their products or service especially with the number of issues they have with regards to items being out of stock so much not to mention there are some quality issues.

I can only say that they have lost our companies business as they have cost us money once again as we are forced to purchase an item elsewhere and incur additional shipping charges all because they simply could not get their online ordering synced with their physical inventory.

One other thing that prompted us to stop working with them last year was what we were told by a rep when a similar issue came up. We asked the rep how long it was going to be before the item we needed was going to be in stock again. She told us that it most likely would be months at best because the item was not a high priority item. This sounds like a company that is struggling to figure out what doing business really means. All this does is simply upset their customer base and slowly erodes confidence in them, driving customers to their competitors.