This little diddy popped up over on White Metal Games’ (WMG) blog the other day, comparing Spikey Bits and Horde of Bits’ services
I’ve featured WMG’s conversions on here before, as they seem to make some really great stuff to fill the gaps that Games Workshop leaves us, from time to time. I guess they may have been trying to return the love with the article they wrote, but it seems pretty legit as far as I can tell.
Good press is always nice, and the depths that this article went to explain the situation and outcomes really pressed home to me what good customer service is about.
Well that and ordering from someone you can trust, not nameless entity cowering behind a eBay user name.
So please be sure if you have ANY problems with your order (eBay or other wise) to contact us immediately as we’ll strive to make it right the best we can. We’re open 10am-10pm eastern everyday for phone calls, and try to get all emails and messages returned daily!
From WMG’s blog. Link to original article
Hoard O’Bits vs. Spikey Bits! Fight!
In the land of wargaming conversion, the bits supplier is king. But what happens if the king is a tyrant? Read on to learn more about a recent bad episode with a bits supplier and how another bits supplier helped me resolve it.
Most of you who follow my blog will know that I often call myself a ‘conversion artist’. For those unfamiliar with the term, which I may have coined . . . I am an artist that has chosen wargaming miniatures as one of my chosen mediums to work through. If I were more talented I’d be a sculptor and be able to make some real money, but since I’m a no talent lout, I just manage to get by.
That` being said I provide a commodity to those that are willing to pay. For a modest price, I can provide a kit-bashed miniature that is blended together with a mix of glue, bits, and 2 part epoxy. If done properly, once painted, the viewer will be unable to distinguish that this model is in fact a conversion at all, but rather a rare and unavailable miniature from the manufacturers themselves.
So why go with a conversion artist? Why not just do it yourself? Well, to be honest, there are many reasons. One is price. Because I buy so many models, I can often sell a stand alone piece using casts off bits from a variety of kits for less than you yourself can purchase those bits individually. Another reason less looked at is confidence. Kit bashing is sometimes an abject lesson in bravery.
You’ve just blown $50.00 on a new Space Marine Kit! Some sort of tank. You want to modify it into, I don’t know, some sort of mobile gun battle altar/chapel/fortress/radio array. You’ve purchased all you glue, bits, and plasticard. Now it comes times to start hacking. To make this conversion work, you’ll need to cut the plamsa distortion rocket pack in half. But what if you miss? What is your cut is off? Can you repair it? Will you have waisted 50 bucks for nothing? Are you good enough with green stuff to make it look like it was intentional battle damage? Will that throw the rest of the model off? Etc, etc, etc.
It can be nerve wracking, even for a guy like me who’s diced up thousands of kits. Ruining a good kit is no less frustrating than realizing you left your cell phone in you pants pocket . . and then washed it. By the time you hear the clank of it rumbling around in the dryer, it’s already too late. That’s money down the drain. (Unless you have a warranty, but I don’t know of a warranty for kit bashing!)
But wait, what’s this, da-da-da-dah!!! To the rescue, bits vendors!
These days, bits vendors are a dime a dozen. There are new ones all the time on ebay, for the lonely seller like me that just sells a few odds and ends (deathspitters, PLEASE, buy some deathspitters!), to the fully outfitted bits warehouse with what I can only imagine are rooms full of low cost immigrant workers milling tirelessly to clip sprues late into the night and put them in little plastic baggies, like cocaine. In fact, bits and cocaine have a lot in common . . .
Suppliers like Spikey Bits, Battle Wagon Bits, Hoard O’Bits, Bits World, and many many more will sell you a small portion of a kit for a fraction of the price. Need just one particular gun? You can have it! The laws of supply and demand generally cause price to run the gambit. A single bit may cost you a dollar or less, or might run you close to half the cost of the kit! In some cases, it’s worthwhile to buy the kit, take what you need and sell the rest for spares on ebay. I certainly do (see deathspitters above)
Now, for a guy like me, I have to make tough calls when I convert a model. Because if I build a model to sell, often I want to be able to reproduce it. For example, before the 2nd wave of Necrons rolled out, I was selling Doom Scythes, Tri-arch Stalkers, Wraiths, Spyders, the whole nine yards! Here was my basic method . .
.
First, I bought a Catacomb Command Barge. This one kit would give me parts for a tomb blade, about half the parts for the doom scythe, and the barge commander I would either sell or eventually use in an Anrakyr the Traveller conversion. For the Spyders I’d buy a destroyer. I’d use the hull for the spyder torso, add some spares from the Deathmark and Lychguard kit. The lychguard now became (with the heads from the deathmark kit) Cryptek conversions. For their staves, I used spares from the Talos kit, which I used the tendril arms from the talos kits for the arms and tail on my Canoptek Wraiths. And this went on and on. The beauty of this is that I used almost all my parts to one effect or another. Sure, I have extras. And they’ve probably end up in the bottom of my necron bits box for a while, or turn up in some sort of rubble marker that I’ll sell on ebay down the road. But the point is, much like the Native Americans of days gone by I used almost all of the deer . . . .er . . .kit in my conversions.
Of course there are gaps. And I used bits vendors to fill in the gaps. As a small businessman myself (small in terms of the business, not in terms of girth, sadly), I keep tracK of all my expenses. I noted that over the past 16 months, I have spent approximately $3900 with Hoard O’Bits. My cars blue book value is less than 3k! I’ve spent more on bits in the past year and a half than I have on my car.
Now, that IS a lot of money, but the value, for me, is well worth it. Normally HOB ships promptly, accurately, and makes very few mistakes. Once in a blue moon I’d get cannon A instead of cannon B, or something of the like, but generally I’d ignore it, let it slide, and go on about my day. Why? Because I accept that human beings make mistakes. Honest mistakes. It happens. Overall my experience with them was wonderful, so why complain?
Over time, my orders got bigger. Business grew and so did my bits orders. What were once $20-30.00 orders quickly became $80-100 orders. Since there was never a problem, and my orders always arrived promptly, I didn’t think twice about it. Trust is everything in a buyer/seller relationship. If I bought a DVD from Amazon, I can trust the Amazon name. (Not another buyer seller THROUGH Amazon, mind you, but buying an item from Amazon itself). Additionally, there is buyer protection in place through paypal, so no worries.
Recently however, something happened. With the release of Necron 2nd Wave I was sellING off the last of my Necron Inventory for liquidation prices. Items that once went for 45-50 bucks were now seller for 15. Break even prices. And that was fine by me, frankly. It was a win win. I didn’t lose money on the items, and the buyers got a good proxy for a fraction of what GW will charge them. As long as they areN’T playing in tournaments, they should have no problems using these for a long time to come.
So, I contacted HOB, my usual bits provider (due to their great variety of supply, stock quantity, and price), placed several large orders, and sit back to await my spoils. Through ebay, tracking info is uploaded automatically whenever a buyer ships through ebay. The orders posted as ‘shipped’ with no tracking info. Okay, no big deal. As long as they’re on their way.
A week passed. Nothing. 2 weeks. Nothing. In the meantime, I’ve got orders going unfilled because I have incomplete models! All I need are a few bits to get these orders out. Each days, I’m dropping my prices, each day, I’m selling, each day, the bits don’t arrive.
Now, I have a caveat on all my custom made auctions, that basically reads something like this “Items Made to Order, please allow up to 10 days for Processing”. This allows me to not overstock my inventory wall, esp. when rumors of official releases are imminent. But with the bits taking over 2 weeks to arrive, now I’m at that terrible precipice where I have to start contacting buyers and let them know that they’re items are being delayed due to vendor supply issues (fortunately, in all cases my buyers were very very accommodating).
After emailed HOB several times without response, I took measures to ensure my customers would get their products in a timely fashion . . . I double ordered bits. But not from HOB.
Instead, this time I select Spikey Bits, ran by Rob Baer or as he’s known on the forums Man Boy Genius. His store can be found here. I ordered from Rob and I am not kidding THE NEXT DAY my bits arrived. Like, less than 24 hours later! OMG. Rob quite literally saved the day, and in record time.
Rob knows bits. He’s been in the bits business a long time. He was to work for the WarStore and ran Battlewagon Bits for them, so he knows what he’s doing. Additionally, his site is very user friendly. And I don’t just mean easy to navigate, because to be fair the HOB site is pretty easy to navigate. But he’s got contact info, terms and conditions, shipping policies, FAQ, links to other services, and the works. I can email him, call him, text him, and he responds! Quickly. Hell, the bits order I mentioned before he fulfilled all the way from Adepticon! That’s right, he was at Adepticon this year and I called him while he was in a team tournament. Although he didn’t win the tournament, he’s a champion in my book. Rob, I’d give you a trophy if I could!
After resolving the immediate crisis, I went ahead and filled an ‘items not received’ claim through ebay, with the bits in question being over 2 weeks past due at this point. Then, no sooner have I filed the claim then what shows up on my door step. The missing bits from HOB. Problem was, the post mark on the box read 2 days earlier. Which meant that on ebay, where it said the item had shipped 2 weeks before (without tracking info, remember), they had lied. Simply lied. They still hadn’t responded to my messages, and to add insult to injury they blocked me as a buyer. Now, I’m no idiot. I’m sure what happened is my order, being unusually large, meant HOB had to order extra kits to fill it. It took time they have to order the kits and those take 10 days to arrive. But on ebay they have to mail items within just a few days to maintain their seller status. So they marked them as ‘shipped’ and simply shipped them later without uploading the tracking info. Okay, but couldn’t they have emailed me or at least apologized for the delay?
So, in summary, after long term customer loyalty and a car’s worth of bits ($3900 bucks worth), what do I get for my trouble? I get blocked, bits I can no longer use from a company with no return policy, and they don’t respond to my emails. After all this I did a little more digging. No where on the HOB page can I find a phone number where someone can be reached, anything about the company, it’s owners, its terms or conditions, it’s policies, or the like. On it’s listing through ebay as well, there is noticeably little information about the company itself. Not that I need much info. But if you bought a car from a dealer (see $3900 above), wouldn’t you like to be able to call them if there was a problem with you car?. Now, to put this in perspective, a company like HOB has over 21,000 items in stock and through ebay they have sold more than 120,000 items. And that’s just the ones they’ve received feedback on. These guys are the Amazon.com of bits vendors. But does that give them a license to practice poor customer service? If I have a problem with an order through Amazon or Ebay, I can contact customer support. If an order goes missing from Spikey Bits, I can call Rob and he can pull up the tracking info on my order. What sort of business practices does HOB guide their business by that they thing customer service isn’t an important part of doing business?
Now, please understand. I like HOB. I like Spikey Bits, too. Each company has their pro’s and con’s. HOB is an older company. They have wider selection, they are reasonably priced, and they combine shipping. But they have NO customer support and by no I mean none. Not only that, I would argue that have whatever the opposite of customer support is. Their ‘contact us’ link is literally a black hole where emails go in but they don’t come out.
Spikey Bits on the other hand has excellent customer service. I had an order go missing in the mail one time and Rob simply sent me an entirely new order. And I’m not talking one or two items. I’m talking over a hundred bucks worth of inventory at his personal expense. That’s just how he rolls. His supply is growing daily, his terms and conditions are clearly spelled out, he is easy to reach and in a variety of ways, he has a BM store that you can actually roll up into if you have a concern, and he has FREE SHIPPING. I mean, they are bits after all.
So for me, in a versus match, it’s a no brainer . . Spikey Bits wins! Finish him!
Have you had a similar experience with a bits supplier? Please share your input and comments for the community to hear!
Well I’ve never heard anything bad about White Metal Games’, and as I said above, have even featured them on here several times. So be sure to checkout their conversions and keep them in mind if you need any work done. –MBG
About the Author: Rob Baer
