Heartsy

If I could give Heartsy negative hearts, or maybe five skull and crossbones, I would. And this has nothing to do with whether or not small businesses should afford group discount sites like this – this has everything to do with their customer service. If this was a one-time experience, I might feel differently, but knowing that I am not the only one that this (my 2nd deal experience) has happened to, I wonder about their motives and feel compelled to speak. Hark! 

I've run two deals on Heartsy. My first deal I specified a $12/$30 voucher for VIP only with no additional credit as a VIP. This was agreed upon easily and without any teeth-pulling and my deal sold out in under two hours on the day it was live to the Heartsy public. I'd had advice from a friend who had the same experience I would have in my next Heartsy voucher, against running deals with extra credit for VIPs, and was glad that they accepted my deal submission without any real hassle. Smooth sailing. Money in the kitty. Yeah yeah.

The second deal, unfortunately, is what makes me question Heartsy's motives. I explicitly said the same deal and told my representative that I could not give an additional credit to VIPs, but lo, the day my sale goes live to the VIPs, there's the additional credit. Now, deals go live around 12am PST, when all of Heartsy is asleep. That being said, 9 hours went by before anybody was around to do anything about my deal – some 40 vouchers were bought with the incorrect, misrepresented deal and, so, a customer service nightmare ensued. (This just so happens to be my intern's week off. Of course.)

Around 9:30am, Heartsy Rep. Andy switched my deal back to what it should be – and here's where the problems began. 40 of my customers sat around for 9 hours either buying things from my shop or dreaming up what they were going to buy from my shop with their shiny $40. If they had bought product with their voucher, I was out more product than I intended to be. If they didn't use it yet, and then they went to use it after 9:30am, they encountered a $30 voucher in the place of the $40 voucher they bought and were told they had received. This is a terrible customer experience, and to my knowledge, no emails yet have been sent to my Heartsy customers (at least by 3pm) about the change of their voucher.

Now, being the customer service swift monkey that I am, I plan to honor the $40 voucher those customers bought because that's what they bought. I posted onto Facebook about this issue, and allowed those customers that had the golden $40 vouchers to keep them. It was the only thing to do, really. Otherwise, it's false advertising. So Heartsy basically forced me into offering the $10 extra credit for nearly 1/3 of my available vouchers. And to top it off, they treat it as a "2nd voucher" (*cough* not their mistake *cough*), so the credit I receive is the 60% off credit that I was giving for the "1st voucher", even though I never agreed to this "2nd voucher" (*cough* because they screwed up *cough*).

I'm not really mad about the product or the money at this point. I'm mad about the level (or lack) of service received from the Heartsy team in facing this situation. I had email proof of an agreement for a basic voucher to VIPs only and they dropped the ball completely. Their customer service response to redeem themselves on my issue was to allow me to run a new deal in a couple of weeks without jumping through the voting hoops ~ who are they kidding? Now that I know what Heartsy is really about – and that seems to be shivving handmade entrepreneurs and itty biz owners –  why on earth would I want to saturate my customer base with yet another voucher to possibly go awry? And, since I know I am not the only one who has had this experience, why would I ever return? Why would I ever recommend them to anyone else, for that matter?

Itty biz owners, be warned! Go elsewhere, for the love of Pete and Pete!