Bike Frame Fiasco
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008This past week, we had a customer who wanted to match his bike frame. He wanted to send us a picture of the bike so we could match it. After emailing back several times, “we cannot match from a picture” and even pointing to this link on our site which explains just why we cannot match from a picture, the customer just sent us another picture. We explained custom matching would be necessary to get an accurate match. We asked the customer to fill out our custom match form which gives complete instructions on the process. The customer replied, no, sorry, I cannot send you a part.
More pictures emailed to us. Again, we politely told the customer we cannot match from a picture. Then the customer wrote us saying the bike frame was painted a Honda color, Cobalt Blue. I said great, and told the customer to select the Year, Make and Model and order the color. Of course, the customer had no color code and we have several warnings on the site about ordering paint this way.
Surprise, surprise, the paint didn’t match the bike frame! The customer was very upset at us. The customer emailed and said “I was talked into ordering the paint.” Hmmm….interesting comment since all communication was by email. If you tell me you want Honda Cobalt Blue and I will send you the link to this paint and a warning about ordering without a color code.
The customer sent about 10 emails over the 4th of July holidays. Of course, more pictures which we politely emailed back and said we could not use. Then the customer said it may be a Toyota Blue, or even a Hyundai Blue. The customer asked since the paint we sent didn’t match, could it be returned and could we send out the Toyota paint to try? Maybe it’s really GM Vega blue. The point is, we have no idea what color the bike frame really is unless we see it!
Again, we directed him to our custom match link and again, the customer would or could not send us a part.
Now, this customer is quite angry at us. What this customer doesn’t realize is we have to custom make each order from formula. If you look at the link, you can understand why pictures are so difficult to match and why we always refuse these requests. Look how different these colors look and they were all taken from the same car!
So please, you should never order a paint unless you know the color code. We do an excellent job at mixing paint. We are not so good at guessing color codes!
