Back in March of 2018, I began my subscription to the MakerGeeks 3D GeekBox. It was a rocky road, culminating in my October, November and December boxes being canceled and refunded. As of now I have canceled my subscription and will not be resubscribing anytime in the near future. As I have said in my monthly reviews, I do believe the filament is great quality for the price, however, the execution and logistics have been horrible. Not just with the GeekBox but with general shipping and inventory, it seems as though they frequently have items available for sale on their website but no actual inventory to back it up. As of the new year, they have revamped their website and pricing structure, maybe they are trying to rectify the current logistical issues, we will have to wait and see.
Previous monthly GeekBox reviews are here:
The previous reviews give a glimpse into what I and many others have dealt with when subscribing to the monthly GeekBox. Some months were hit or miss, with regards to timing and content. The final straw that lead to my subscription cancellation and a refund of the final three boxes of the year started in October when I was double billed for my GeekBox.
Right after my first few boxes came late, I decided to change the renewal date to the 1st of the month in hopes of MakerGeeks possibly processing the GeekBoxes in order of renewal. When October came around, I was billed properly on October 1st. Later on in the month after looking at my credit card bill I noticed a second charge from MakerGeeks for the same price as another geek box. When logging into my GeekBox subscription I can see my renewal date had been changed and thus I guess their system had billed me a second time. The problem was, I never changed my renewal date, something in their system must have caused it to update. PSA, everyone should routinely check their credit card statements and if you are a geek box subscriber make sure you check your renewal date. I, of course, contacted them about this issue and was told I would be refunded within 5-10 business days. I then changed my renewal date back to the 1st of the month and figured I would just do the final 2 geek boxes of the year and be done with this. Sure enough, a few more weeks go by and still no refund for the double billing. I have read previous complaints on BBB and the best thing to do now was to just dispute the charge, which I proceeded to do. On top of not receiving the refund for a billing mistake on their end, I checked my subscription renewal and it had yet again changed to another date. If you are going to subscribe to the GeekBox, check your credit card statements and subscription renewal date, I doubt I’m the only person this has happened too.
I feel as though I have been pretty patient throughout all of the issues I have dealt with, but when you clearly double bill and don’t immediately rectify that, you have completely lost my trust. It seems as though if you are not getting an immediate refund, going the route of disputing the charge is your last resort.
While dealing with trying to get a refund I still had not received my October box and we were nearing the point of when the November box should be shipping out. I spent about 2 months emailing for updates on both my October and November boxes, the final email thread culminated with my explanation that if they cannot provide service that I paid for, I will be forced to dispute the October/November boxes as well. Once I made the threat of the dispute I was refunded October, November and December GeekBox orders.
As of this writing anyone on their email list likely received the following email:
Well, that’s no good at all…
Good morning, well as you might know or might not know MakerGeeks.com is having a bit of a rough patch – we have grown and grown and grown over the last 24 months and we finally reached our breaking point over Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018.
With our equipment issues and not being able to ship all your orders on time we started to run into trouble with the BBB and claims of fraud.While we in no way took any money fraudulently or with the intent of not shipping we did fully drop the ball and our support team and shipping couldn’t keep up with the demand.
So, the drama continues – this Sunday we received an email from Google saying that they had received a report from an anonymous tipster that our website, hosted on Shopify, had a vulnerability and they blocked the website and we were asked to provide a scan to prove that the site was clean of any malicious apps. We did submit the scan as perfectly clean and Google is now reviewing the site to bring it back online.
Talk about bad timing – with the bad press coming out over the weekend and now our website and emails being down … that sort of reinforces the rumors which is unfortunate to say the least – since we are all here working hard everyday to make and ship filament.
So, you should be up to speed now…. I just wanted to reach out and give you all a way to get in touch with us… we have a work around email at geekHelp@makergeeks.net and we can work with you to provide a FULL refund for anything you are missing – please just email us with your order number and what you are missing from that and we’ll get you a full refund right away.
The January 3D Geek Box is shipping out today and you should be getting an email with tracking info very soon this morning.
Right now we have our sister website up and operational at www.filamentgeeks.com and we are running filament today and will have some stock and colors building back up slowly as we try and move through this.
I just want to tell everyone that I apologize for letting this get so out of control; as the founder I know the blame lands on me fully – I know many of you love our filament and have enjoyed our service and I hope we can rebuild and re-start so we can keep bringing you great spools and filament made in the USA.
Joshua b Smith
– Founder
geekHelp@makergeeks.net
All of this likely explains the quick response to begin refunding everyone’s orders who were late or never shipped, like the monthly GeekBoxes and my large filament order from black F