My experience ordering directly from Yoga Democracy — the customer service response somehow made it worse
My experience ordering directly from Yoga Democracy — the customer service response somehow made it worse
I’m curious whether anyone else has had a similar experience ordering directly from Yoga Democracy, because this has been one of the strangest online purchases I’ve had in a while.
My yoga studio sells Yoga Democracy leggings for around $98. I like them, so when I saw that Yoga Democracy sells directly online for considerably less, I placed an order on August 7.
My credit card was charged immediately.
But I received no order confirmation. No receipt. Nothing.
I contacted them because seeing a charge on my card with absolutely no record of an order was concerning. I was told there had been a “backend system glitch” and assured that my order had been submitted.
But they still didn’t send me a receipt.
I had to follow up again and specifically ask for one. At that point, I was sent a screenshot of what appeared to be their internal invoice.
Okay. At least I now had some evidence the order existed.
Twelve days after placing the order, I still had no shipping notification or tracking information, so I followed up again.
Their response:
“As soon as your order ships, you’ll receive an email with tracking information.”
That didn’t answer the question. So, once again, I had to follow up and ask something more specific: When is it expected to ship?
Only then was I told:
“We changed fulfillment centers across the country and had to have two huge shipments that came in from Kenya relocated to our new fulfillment center.”
I was also told that my order was in the fulfillment queue and that they couldn’t provide an estimated ship date.
At that point, I canceled my $63.75 order and requested a refund. They told me the refund had been issued and that I should see it within 2–3 business days.
As of writing this, the refund has not appeared on my card, so I can only confirm that I’ve been told it was processed. Given that this whole experience began with a charge appearing on my card without an order confirmation or receipt, I’ll consider that piece resolved when the credit actually posts.
But my bigger issue isn’t even the 12-day delay.
It’s that I had to repeatedly contact the company and ask increasingly specific questions to obtain basic information they already had.
I contacted them because I had been charged without receiving a confirmation or receipt. I was told there was a glitch, but I still had to contact them again and specifically request a receipt.
I contacted them about shipping and was told I’d receive tracking “as soon as” it shipped. I then had to ask again when it would actually ship before anyone disclosed the warehouse transition, relocated inventory, fulfillment backlog, and inability to provide a shipping estimate.
Why wasn’t all of that communicated when I first contacted them?
I shouldn’t have to know exactly which follow-up question to ask to figure out what’s happening with an order a company has already charged me for.
I told them that.
And their response somehow made the whole thing more frustrating.
It began:
“The truth is, everything that was communicated to you was accurate.”
But I never accused anyone of lying to me.
Accuracy wasn’t my complaint. The failure to communicate relevant information was my complaint.
The response then shifted almost entirely to what Yoga Democracy was going through:
“We are a very small team and unfortunately, when technical glitches like this happen, there are a surplus of customer inquiries that we are working diligently to get through.”
If a known technical problem was affecting enough customers to create a “surplus of customer inquiries,” that actually makes me wonder why customers weren’t being proactively notified.
Then:
“We also changed fulfillment centers across the country and had to have two huge shipments that came in from Kenya relocated to our new fulfillment center. Our CEO had to personally take the shipments to our new fulfillment center and this has been a difficult process.”
I’m sure it has been a difficult process.
But I genuinely don’t understand why I’m being told that the CEO personally transported shipments.
I was a customer explaining that I had been charged, received no confirmation or receipt, had to chase down proof of my purchase, received no proactive notice of a significant fulfillment delay, and had to repeatedly ask questions before finally being told there wasn’t even an estimated ship date.
And the response was focused on how difficult the situation has been for the company.
They continued:
“We are implementing a new shipping interface as well which is why the automatic confirmation emails have not been sent out.”
Again: why wasn’t I simply told that when I first contacted them specifically because I hadn’t received a confirmation?
That’s the part I can’t get past.
I completely understand that small businesses have operational problems. Systems break. Warehouses move. Shipments get delayed. Employees get overwhelmed.
But if you know these things are happening, communicate them to your customers.
Put a notice on the website. Warn people at checkout. Email customers whose orders are affected. Or, at the absolute minimum, when a customer contacts you because she’s been charged and hasn’t even received confirmation that her order exists, tell her what’s actually going on.
Instead, I had to ask:
Where is my confirmation?
Can I have a receipt?
Has my order shipped?
When will it ship?
Why hasn’t it shipped?
And only through that process did I get the full story.
Then, when I specifically raised the lack of communication as my concern, instead of simply saying:
“You’re right. We should have communicated this to you upfront, and you shouldn’t have had to keep asking.”
…I got an explanation of their small team, technical problems, volume of customer inquiries, warehouse transition, shipments from Kenya, new shipping interface, and the CEO personally transporting inventory.
There was also no attempt at service recovery. No small credit toward a future purchase. No gesture that said, “We’d like another opportunity to earn your business.”
And I don’t consider the promised refund a service-recovery gesture. I canceled an order that hadn’t shipped. Returning my money is simply unwinding the transaction.
I genuinely like their leggings. I wanted to be their customer. A delayed order wouldn’t necessarily have changed that. A warehouse transition wouldn’t necessarily have changed that either.
What changed it was having to repeatedly chase basic information and then, when I raised that concern, receiving a response centered primarily on why I should understand what the company was going through.
Has anyone else ordered directly from Yoga Democracy recently? I’m genuinely curious whether this is an isolated mess during their transition or whether this is typical of their direct-order customer service.
I’ll update this post if/when the $63.75 refund actually appears on my card.