The scoop on 'rarepalmseeds.com'

Dear Mr. Wang,
the way we see this problem is that we would be happy to deliver the remaining goods to you at any time, but you refuse to have them delivered directly to you for a reason unknown to us. We have tried to explain this problem to you over the phone, but you do not seem to want to understand.

The $3000 and $2000 charges we tried to run was for a recent order you placed (order ID: 919-124-6887, $5500, Jan 24th 2008), which you subsequently put on hold. I will happily give more details if you do not remember your order.

Both of these issues have nothing to do with scamming and I would ask you to refrain from such accusations or we will have to consider taking legal action against you.

Best, rarepalmseeds.com

Our apologies, we are aware that our communication is not always 100% efficient. We are trying to reply to every message, but sometimes we are simply overwhelmed with the amount of e-mails we receive (and that already excludes all the spam messages). We try to concentrate on getting out your orders. Please take into account that we are shipping out hundreds of orders a week, to nearly 150 countries around the world, all with different import regulations that require attention. We handle large quantities of perishable, difficult-to-handle and even more difficult to obtain palm seeds in a large variety that is second to none for good reason. Our website is the most popular palm site on the internet and naturally requires a lot of maintenance as we would like to keep it there and have the best information on palms available for everyone.
Rarepalmseeds is just a small company with 8 employees. Our communication is not outsourced to some call center in a far away place and hiring and training more people to answer all the e-mails we receive is a serious cost factor that will reflect on the cost of seeds you buy.
We think we can offer a good compromise between cost and service and hope you will be easy on us even if you are not getting a reply to every e-mail as you should. Its not because we are rude or lazy, just very busy.

Your original order was shipped mid January, not an unfair delay. After your call, a replacement was shipped on Feb. 21st, which should arrive any day. Please blame any shortcomings beyond this on the Greek postal system.

Did it ever occur to you that some palm seeds may take a long time to sprout? Our instructions say up to 2 years, even if you do it right. Perhaps patience is needed here more than anything.

You should have inquired or complained about your lack of success. We don't claim that all seeds work every time. It is in the nature of palm seeds that many of them are not easy to sprout. For this reason we are not shy sending replacements, but we need to hear about them.

On the Kerriodoxa seeds with broken radicles, why did you not ask for replacements? We surely would have offered them had you informed us that most of that item was damaged.

As for shipping seeds damp, in plastic bags, this is the only way to keep many palm seeds viable. Many palm seeds are tricky items. It can happen that one or more seeds in a bag get moldy in transit. When you receive seeds it is therefore a good idea to float the seeds in water and clean them gently if necessary. With some exceptions, good seeds will sink, bad seeds will float.
We were unable to find your e-mail complaining about this. We have a very large volume of e-mails to handle, and a spam mail problem like everyone. If you don't get a reply, please send your mail again.

We did have a problem with a particular batch of orders held up in the mail. Please be aware that many time consuming factors of mailing seeds from Europe to the US are not in our hands, such as phytosanitary certificate, US customs inspection, USDA inspection, delays in the postal system etc.
Please understand that we can't accept cancellation for seed already mailed.
We assume you eventually got your seeds and that they were ok since there was no chargeback to your credit card. We hope they will do well for you.

About problems with the first order we had a lengthy exchange with "semillas". Seeds were shipped exactly 2 weeks from the date of order by regular airmail, for which we charged, at cost, $20 to the Canary Islands, certainly not outrageous in my perception (we do encourage our customers to ask for shipping costs on wholesale orders as they differ vastly between destinations all over the world). After a complaint about fungus, the seeds were eventually returned to us and it turned out they had never actually been sown. We could not find anything wrong with them, they fared well in a viability test, and we offered "semillas" to return them to him. Since we got no reply, the seeds were sown and we got reasonable results from them, good if taking into account the months that they had beed sitting around.
On the second order we never received a complaint.
That we do not perform germination tests is an outright lie. In fact we test every single batch of seeds for viability and sow sample batches of most in our own nursery, not many seed dealers can claim that. Our seeds come from all over the world, not just from Asia. In fact, in "semillas's" case they came from Chile, Brazil, Italy, Madagascar, Australia and South Africa. Apart from the fact that none of the seeds were actually from Asia, I would like to question "semillas's" expertise on how seeds are cleaned in Asia.
We rest content knowing that most people have good results with our seeds, otherwise they would hardly be coming back for more.