This is my first harsh review and my first longest review ever. So here goes:
I have placed online orders with Sephora before and never had issues...until the last 5 days. So I placed an online order for two eye shadow palettes (paid $75 ish , valued at $150) on the 21st of December, 2018 and the order was due to be delivered around the 9th of January, 2019. So I give them a call on the 13th of January, to see where my order is at (note I gave them well over 3 days for the benefit of the doubt) and the service rep tells me that my order was misplaced. At this point, one of the palettes that I had ordered was out of stock (it was a Christmas only edition), so he offered to refund me for the entire order or offer a partial refund and express ship the other palette. Now this was going to be a gift for my sister back home in India, and I leave on the 20th of Jan (in 7 days from when I first called Sephora), so I chose to go with the second option and have the one available palette EXPRESS reshipped. This package was due for delivery yesterday - 16th of Jan, and I have not seen or received notifications on this yet. At this point, I am not enjoying making this purchase anymore, so I call Sephora again, only to hear that my package is misplaced AGAIN and they can reship my order or refund me. Please note, they do not have this product in any nearby stores, and this is a gift for my sister as I am going back home after 2 years. Frustrating, much?! So not only am I one palette short, I actually do not have ANY of the two palettes I ordered a month ago and they are not available in- stores in my city and the ones that are, are full priced now (I am 3 days away from flying and at this point my budget is tight) and Sephora VALUES MY INCONVENIENCE AT $7.90 (CAD) and gives me a credit for this absurd amount. Way to go for customer service and customer experience.
And that is not all.
I purchased an Origins moisturizer ($36 before tax = 36 points) back in June 21, 2018 from one of the Sephora stores. For some reason, the points did not go through for this transaction, but I received the receipt in my email. Now, I was very close to reaching VIB status so I called Sephora around September/October 2018 when I realised those points were not reflected in my account and the person said that after I make the next purchase I can call them back and they will update these missing points to achieve my VIB status (not sure why he couldn't do that then, if he could do it later). So when I called today about my missing order, I also mentioned my missing points because now my profile has gone back to sqaure one and I have to shop for $350 again to be able to reach VIB whereas, in December 2018, I was only 9 points short without the 36 missing points to reach VIB status. So the guy now tells me that this will not be possible because the new year cycle has begun. So, basically what Sephora is saying is that they cannot update my status to VIB, even though I spent more than the qualifying $350 in 2018 because there was a glitch in their system when my points didn't go through back in June, and their customer service person could not help me back in October to reflect those points towards my Beauty Insider profile.
If I could buy all the brands from another store from here-on, I would, because it seems that the people at Sephora are just a bunch of snobs because they offer these "Sephora Only Exclusive" brands, but it is the customers problem if Sephora cannot follow through their service.