Have you tried King Tea Mall? UPD: Bad experience

I was really trying to like this vendor. When I tried one of the teas and it was good, I made it a point to post about it, in part so others would see his Tea was good. Then I tasted others that were clearly off, almost exactly as opilgrim described. So I was very honest and open about it. One of the teas was clearly rotten in some way, I have no doubt. Sour is a very bad sign. This was not a matter of my personal taste preferences. He would not even refund that one.

Now there are three of us who have these issues and have posted about it. This is a pattern. The vendor acted very nice at first, but now he is getting defensive and reneging on his promise of guaranteeing good quality Tea. how exactly does that guarantee work if he doesn’t accept the customer’s reaction?

I don’t think it is appropriate for a vendor to engage like this with Steepster folks on forums. He is clearly trying to do a sales job. I do not get angry easily and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Look at my prior postings on this thread. I find this very disappointing and I am very mad. I hope people stop buying from King Tea, and I do not say that lightly. He has broken any trust that was there.

Just wanted to post an update. I requested a refund through PayPal for around $50, out of a $150 order, for two cakes which were not right. I did not ask for more, or even any shipping costs. The seller is fighting the claim. This is not a very customer oriented way of dealing with problems. He never even said that he checked his inventory to be sure there wasn’t a problem with the teas one way or the other. There are probably subpar teas that he will now try to sell to others without confirming whether there is even a problem.

Buy at your own risk. This is not a trustworthy way of doing business in my opinion.

PayPal refused any refund. At least one of the teas I purchased was clearly rancid and there was no recourse. I wish the seller would at least have tried to work with me for a peaceful resolution.

I’ve had really good experiences with this site so far. I just placed my second order because the first one was great. I also asked him about getting some Dian Cha tea and he said he was going to try and stock it so that’s pretty nice. That stuff is hard to find from the US.

I’d never checked in on this thread, but I have tried some samples from this vendor, so I can add a little. I should start by saying that they were provided by the vendor for review, so the issues with bad versions, teas that were off in some way, naturally wouldn’t come up in featured versions sourced directly or produced by the vendor versus resold items. The teas I tried were exceptional and a good value for listed pricing.

I can’t offer any opinion on the negative experiences communicated by others. It seems possible the teas were of lower quality than represented, or had unsuitable storage conditions issues, and it also seems possible that the buyer’s expectations were the problem instead, that customers may not have been familiar with standard range for what they were buying. There is no way to guess about that from hearsay accounts. You can’t place whether or not the customers are familiar with the tea types they bought, or could judge quality level to any reasonable degree. It sounds like there were customer service problems on the vendor’s side but even that can easily be misrepresented, even by 2 or 3 different people. I’ve seen some of the most respected and accepted as consistent vendors in the industry comment on the same problems, but again on the other side regardless of what comes up a vendor needs to resolve issues appropriately, no matter the cause of the problems.

To add more hearsay in the past half year or so one of the few people I trust most related to sourcing options mentioned that he uses King Tea Mall as a main source, but of course that doesn’t add much, as third-hand input. Maybe people new to exploring teas and sourcing should start with more standard options (Yunnan Sourcing, White 2 Tea, Crimson Lotus, etc.) then move onto other alternatives gradually, so that they have a frame of reference for comparison. Yunnan Sourcing offers so many different products that variation in character and quality level (and also value, probably) would naturally come up in buying from a vendor like that, and checking in with discussion input and reviews here could help compensate for that.