I placed an order with TAD GEAR thru their web site two days before New Years. Items didn't ship until yesterday. Needless to say I already bought them in local stores since I needed them badly. No confirmation email was sent or anything that would let me know that gears were turning to get my order out. My message left on their voice mail was unanswered until yesterday.

Maybe it's because it was a holiday season and me being a New Yorker expected too much out of merchants or maybe it was a glitch in the system. Moral of the story is to follow up on the order. Also when ordering by phone with TAD I never had a problem and their customer service was always 101% devoted to my satisfaction. It's just little frustrating now to have to reverse charges especially since I'm broke due to my paramedic course and all the book purchases.

Matt

I've never dealt with TAD Gear yet. Their product line has some truely unique products such as their life capsule. I have had similar experiences with other online merchants that I've learned to get over. Seems that the personal contact of a phone call will make things much different.

I have ordered many items from Majorsurplusandsurvival.com and they have an automatic email reply assuring you that they will ship the items. Then several weeks go by and the box arrives with less than all the items and a note stating that some were back ordered or out of stock and a reciept reflecting the change in what your credit card was actually billed. They have always been business like and never lost or over-charged me. But often slow. I shifted to phoning my orders in after shoping the web-site and suddenly there were no more back-order / out-of-stock problems and my items showed up that week. Many merchants treat thier web outlets as a poor step-child to their main business and don't give it the proper attention. Of course that doesn't excuse a company and wont work at all for merchants whose entire business is on the web.

Let me say that I consider Majors to be an excellent source for the sorts of things that they carry. Many times they are also the cheapest source. Their discription of their used surplus is accurate. When they state that something is like new it is and if they say it has some wear or is beat up it is. That is a major thing with surplus. I would recommend this merchant to anyone but I would also recommend that you shop online and order by phone. It helps to know how to deal with people.

I placed a phone order w/ TAD a bit before the Christmas holidays and received it quite promptly, especially considering the package had to traverse from California to S. Carolina.

I like to shop web-based companies but I prefer to place the order by phone. Talking to a real person seems to avoid issues like "it's out of stock" or website scripting errors.

Hey Polak187: I start EMT-B training next Monday. Woo-hoo!!!

Sorry to hear about your experience - I live near their store (which is in Oakland, CA) and have always bought things in person. Good guys and a great selection of stuff - probably was just a holiday glitch.

- Steve

From their reputation, I am sure that they are honest and want to please...

With that being said, their handle on being a web-based business leaves a LOT to be desired. I was on their e-mail mailing list. Over a period of two or three months, I got a "test" message or two. They also sent an e-mail out where you could see the names of EVERY RECIPENT as a part of the header. If I were a spammer, I could have had at least 50 e-mail of people interested in survival gear. That is a serious privacy concern.

Maybe they just need to hire a new webmaster. A likely scenario is that something was back-ordered due to the holidays.

Did you ever call to cancel the order?

Not to stick up for them, but when I went to their website on Christmas eve (I was up late waiting for Santa) I thought I saw something stating that they were to be closed for the holidays from the 25th to Jan 5th or something like that.

It was under the Whats New catagory on the top of the page (my first stop usually) IIRC. It may not have been listed on all the pages.

Sorry for the bad news though. They seemed to be pretty decent folk when I dropped by their store. Evan was pretty into gear. Spent half an hour talking about packs (I have a R.A.I.D., he has Kifaru, MMR & Marauder IIRC).

Actually, to hijack the thread, it was kinda funny getting there.

The weekend before thanksgiving, I went up to NorCal to see my little brother who is a reserve firefighter in the city.

My brother mapped a route to Tadgear on M$ MapPoint or something like that. He swears by it, whatever. Well, his directions bring us to a dead-end on the wrong side of the tracks. LITERALLY. Projects (nice ones though) with the bling-blingers running around. Couple of dead ends, not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling. It is pretty much a warehouse district, by the docks and train tracks.

I pull out my iPaq 5555 with mapopolis and plug in my $29.99 Digitraveler GPS from RatShack. 30 seconds later, find out where we are, where we are supposed to be, and didi mao!

Best $30.00 I ever spent!

With all respect to Evan he is a great guy and solved my problem quickly (we just see if my shipping is going to get refunded as well). He did mentioned something about store being closed which is fine with me but in that case either shopping card should have been disabled, warning should have poped up when paymant was about to be submited, warning email should have been sent to tell me what's going on and when items will get shipped. One of the camera stores I deal with when Jewish holidays comes about still keeps their website open but thru every step of the transaction you are informed that the store is closed and you are not getting your things until whatever date they chose.

Like I said I have no "beef" with these guys on the phone. I think they are great and they got me out of jam few times already. But they bombed the website/internet ordering. That's it.

Hopefully everything was solved to my satisfaction (it seems that way). I don't get little things like that get in my way especially since similar outlet county comm lost my entire phone order and had no courtesy of even calling me.

Matt