The Mystery of Caribbean Garden Seed: What happened?

nune

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I figured that this might be the best place to discuss this mystery, so here's the write-up.

Caribbean Garden Seed is a pretty infamous seed company, known for scamming people according to their Better Business Bureau profile. When people bought seeds and tulips from them on their website, they either didn't arrive or arrived in awful condition. The behavior by the company is so bad that one buyer wants you to call the police.

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According to Better Business Bureau and the Pennsylvania government archives, this company has been in business for seven years with an LLC registration date of September 21, 2015. Etsy archives say that it was in business for longer. The Etsy archives circa 2013-2014 have loads of 5-star reviews.
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(Pictured on September 28, 2014)


An important question to ask is "where did it all go wrong?"

I have two theories.

Theory 1 is that the company has always been scammy, and they've been manipulating reviews. This is supported by several allegations in their reviews on BBB and Google that most, if not all positive reviews are by the company itself or people affiliated with it. It's also supported by the fact that the grammar on the shop was unchanged between its Etsy and website incarnation.

According to a theory, many scammers purposefully type with unproper grammar to catch people who aren't paying attention. I'm not telling you to judge a company based on proper grammar firsthand, you really shouldn't, but this grammar is just one of the attributes of some scams.

Theory 2 is that the company was bought out. This is supported by the trademark filing date being after the business was on Etsy, and the possibility of the "review manipulation" theory not being true. It's also supported by the fact that its Etsy account was banned without warning, after people started reacting negatively to it.

Either way, this is a fun mystery to figure out. You should not buy from this company, but looking into the history of this company is quite interesting.

What are your theories? Discuss in this thread, I'd be glad to hear.
 

flowerbug

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there are a lot of businesses that start out with good intentions but then fail. poor product handling and poor customer service would surely be a good sign that the business would not last too long.

no real mystery to me.
 

nune

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there are a lot of businesses that start out with good intentions but then fail. poor product handling and poor customer service would surely be a good sign that the business would not last too long.

no real mystery to me.
Good point. I suppose that I like to expand on little details. :p
 

Pulsegleaner

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Plenty also seem to not really think through just what doing what they are planning to do is going to take. Companies who plan to sell worldwide often forget about things like just how long it is going to take seeds or bulbs to get from them to whoever bought them, and what conditions they will undergo on the way.

They also often don't want to deal with the paperwork for customs, but also don't want to restrict their sales to those areas where they don't have to bother with them, so they offer to everyone and just hope their stuff sneaks by, which it may or may not (they generally aren't financially indebted to the buyer, but a buyer who loses their seeds or bulbs to customs is not likely to buy from them again.)

Some also work more as middlemen than growers; buying seed from one place and re-selling it somewhere else, and so often lack the knowledge to answer questions buyers may have.

And this can be a problem for even the fairly big, well established companies. I lost a shipment from Rarepalms.com to customs because, while I did request and pay for a phytosanitary certificate, they never filed one because the seed I had ordered also required an import permit number (since it was for woody plants) and, rather than contacting me and telling me, they just sent the seed with no phyto at all (and no, they didn't refund me the money for the phyto either.)

And finally, there are the true out and out scammers (many in Asia) who you can catch because they are offering things that either plain and simply do not exist (like bright blue strawberries and purple fleshed watermelons) or would be far to rare to offer in the amounts they have at the prices they are charging (I have seen dozens of offers for seed of Jade Vine (Strongolydron macrobotrys) despite the fact Jade vine is famous for almost NEVER making seed (it's almost always propagate vegetatively) and relying on Photoshopped pictures to make you think the stuff is real.

And carelessness on what is written is a problem as well (I saw someone on Etsy recently who was putting identical stratification and growing instructions on every seed they offered, even if the seed did not need stratification or trying to do so would actually kill it, like trying to grow corn in pure sand.)
 

ducks4you

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Hard to tell, BUT, usually there is INet commentary about places that sell seed, so you can research an unknown place ahead of time.
SO many online companies--I was about to order a personalized checkbook cover for youngest DD, but I asked eldest DD about the company "ZAZZLE." She reassured me that they Were reputable, but I had never heard of them before an ad showed up on my phone.
Order arrived quickly and I was satisfied.
Also, some smaller companies have websites, like the "local" (90 minutes away from me is local, IMHO), milling company that I purchased from last month, "Janie's Mill."
It takes time to put together pages of product with usable links like this one.
Middle DD, who works on webpages for OSF, has had to deal with a single page that has bugs, but nobody in the department has the good full week needed to rip that one page apart and rebuild the code.
Even, so, I had a dilly of a time trying to order 2 seed packages from Burpees--we ALL know them!--when they had a short lived sale last month. I tried to order on a Saturday, and I couldn't complete it. They extended the sale until the following Monday, and ONLY ON MONDAY could I complete my order.
It could be short staffing. We know that they sell good product.
 

Pulsegleaner

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The night before last, I was ordering some seeds on Etsy, and they wouldn't let me check out without filling in the personalization category. I was like "How do you personalize seeds? The listing covers what is being offered, how much of it, and how much it costs. The selling process gives the seller my funds the name and address to ship the product to and (if requested) the email address and or phone number I can be reached at if they need to communicate . What on earth else would they need to know?"

I also really wish the automatic systems would be programmed to actually take note of where packages are in the process of getting to me, so that they would stop trying to demand I give feedback on transactions before I even receive the item (eBay is the worst for this; they basically want you to leave feedback on the transaction the moment you pay, since all they care about is how easy it was for you to send money to the seller, not whether they actually came through with the item).

Or yesterday, when I wound up having to buy three bags of salt instead of one, because the counting system had marked the singles as "sold out" and didn't know how to transfer (note, this isn't a product where the three bags are bound together, or the larger option is a bag that is three times bigger. The only difference is the slight discount they give you for buying in bulk.)

At this point, whenever I see an item where there is more than one option and more than one unit listed, I always e-mail first to see if they mean that there is more than one of each option, or they simply counted all of the options and put that down as the total number available (like I usually do).
 
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