Can't post anywhere else, so posting here for now.
I wanted some coffee, so I googled "coffee bitcoin" which sent me here:
http://bitbrew.net/Everything looked on the up-and-up. I didn't see any red flags of a scam, the amount wasn't a lot, so I just placed an order.
First problem was that the checkout process requires you to load a page to get a Bitcoin address and then copy/paste it into a form to add it to your cart. I tried it 5-6 times, getting a new address each time and then being told the address was already used.
I temporarily gave up and used the Contact form on the website to report the issue.
I received no confirmation email of my contact submission (second problem).
I then tried the form again and got an address added to my cart finally. I checked out, received an email confirming my order and asking me to send payment. I sent the payment, this was 2 days ago.
Just today I decided I'd check the status of my order. I look at my email which contains a link to the website which does display my order, but there is no status field to tell me whether my payment was received or what stage of processing my order is in (problem three).
I get a momentary flash of worry that maybe the website is a scam, so I Google "BitBrew scam" and get sent to their Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/BitBrew which hasn't been updated in over a year. The two most recent posts on the page ARE users asking where their coffee is, or claiming it is a scam. (Problem four)
So I submit another contact form requesting confirmation that my payment was received and that my order was being processed. (I never received a response to my first request.)
The guy who supposedly runs the site is active on bitcointalk:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=9378;sa=showPosts and has recently posted about BitBrew:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=307874.0So it *seems* legitimate, the point I'm trying to make is that there are still a lot of issues with the customer experience of this Bitcoin business and I'd like to make a few suggestions to the owner:
1. Your order confirmation email should contain some information about how long it takes to process an order.
2. You should really try to send another email when a payment has been confirmed, or if its not confirmed within a certain amount of time, send an email to let the customer know there was a problem.
3. I haven't tried just replying to my order email, but you should check that the contact form on your website is working. (I just received a response while typing this message, thanks for getting back to me so quick, but still going to post this because there's still some good points here.)
4. A Facebook page with 126 likes needs to be curated better. You can't just leave posts calling it a scam or asking where their product is unresponded to. Especially when this is the first thing that comes up in a search for "bitbrew scam".
5. This might be an example of where having dates on your website is a bad thing if they aren't recent. Almost all the pages on
http://bitbrew.net/ have a 'posted' date, likely because it uses some CMS system, but having all the dates from 2011-2012 is a bad sign when you are worried the site might be dead and just taking your money something.
6. Ed mentioned in his response to me that he's been meaning to put a status field in the site generated invoice, this is obviously a very good idea
Now I don't want this to totally look like I"m shitting on BitBrew.
Ed responded to my request for confirmation of my payment within 40 minutes, if I hadn't gone searching down the rabbit hole trying to find all this stuff myself and just waited an hour I would have got my response.
So this is not meant to be directly pointed at BitBrew, it is more meant as a general description of how when you place an order with Bitcoin and have no recourse to chargeback/etc, companies need to be extra careful to provide a good customer experience that helps counteract any fear that your order and/or Bitcoins were just taken without recourse.
If I hadn't come to bitcointalk to search for Ed and BitBrew I would have come to a totally different conclusion (before receiving Ed's email) that BitBrew was either a scam or a server left running and no longer being actively maintained (I did eventually see a recent post on the website, but that was after I started writing this).
